Love is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

I wasted all your precious time I wasted it all on you.

It’s a date. Just me and Renée and some tunes she picked out.

All these tunes remind me of her now. It’s like that old song, “88 Lines About 44 Women.” Except it’s 8,844 lines about one woman. We’ve done this before. We get together sometimes, in the dark, share a few songs. It’s the closest we’ll get to hearing each other’s voices tonight.

We had nothing in common, except we both loved music. It was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. We did a lot of work to meet in the middle. Music brought us together. So now music was stuck with us. I was lucky I got to be her guy for a while.

It was a smashing time, and then it ended, because that’s what times do.

The whole world got cheated out of Renée. I got cheated less than anybody, since I got more of her than anybody. But still, I wanted more of her. I wanted to be her guy forever and ever.

I’m a mix tape, a cassette that’s been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.

The memory comes back, hours or days later. It always comes back. But in the moment, I panic. I’m positive it’s gone for good.

Nothing connects to the moment like music. I count on the music to bring me back—or, more precisely, to bring her forward.

A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.

There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one.

I Want You Always a great reason to make a tape.

There are millions of songs in the world, and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. Making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan.

A mix tape steals these moments from all over the musical cosmos, and splices them into a whole new groove.

The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with—nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do.

Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.

“Take this, all of you, and rock. This is the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you, and for all who rock, so that rock may be worshiped and glorified.”

How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people?

Renée told me the whole time she was alone in bed, she sang a song over and over to comfort herself. She sang: “The only one who could ever reach me, was the Makin’-the-Pizza Man.”

Renée and I just stared at each other. For her, it was an epiphanic moment—punk rock was now music that even figure-skater girls could listen to. The door was open. Our turn had arrived. Here we are now. Entertain us.

I suddenly realized how much being a husband was about fear: fear of not being able to keep somebody safe, of not being able to protect somebody from all the bad stuff you want to protect them from. Knowing they have more tears in them than you will be able to keep them from crying.

But that’s who your wife is, the person you fail in front of. Love is so confusing; there’s no peace of mind.

And they’re right—what could be scarier, stupider, than staying together? How else could you totally guarantee that you would always have reasons to be terrified?

“Refusal is not the act of a friend,” she said. “You must let me draw the water from the well.”

The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you’re standing outside. You’ll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you’ve been out there a while, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you’re getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin.

Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it. I was trying so hard to be strong. I knew how to go out, how to stay in, how to get things done, but that was it.

Sometimes I could feel the glaciers shifting inside me, and I hoped they were melting, but they were just making themselves comfortable. All these monstrous contortions in me were warping the outside of my body, I was sure. No doubt people could spot me a block away and know that I had lived past my till-death-do-you-part date.

But all the things you want to learn from grief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn. There are no revelations, no wisdoms as a trade-off for the things you have lost. You just get stupider, more selfish. Colder and grimmer. You forget your keys. You leave the house and panic that you won’t remember where you live. You know less than you ever did. You keep crossing thresholds of grief and you think, Maybe this one will unveil some sublime truth about life and death and pain. But on the other side, there’s just more grief.

It’s not human to let go of love, even when it’s dead.

“I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.”

I can fit other things into the space she used to occupy, but whether I choose to do that, her absence from that space is permanent.

The loss doesn’t go away—it just gets bigger the longer you look at it.

What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying.

(Christmas is like the “Hey Jude” of holidays—every five years, at one-third the length, it would be a perfectly nice idea.)

Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.

But it didn’t turn out that way, and there’s something strange and upsetting about that. I would have stayed in 1996 if I could have, but it wasn’t my choice, so now I have to move either forward or back—it’s up to me. Not changing isn’t an option.

And even though I’ve changed in so many ways—I’m a different person with a different life—the past is still with me every minute.

When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.

Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them.

But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.