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The Lost Love of The Mixed Tape

When I was in junior high and high school I experienced a great deal of love and heartbreak. Just not with an actual person. Only through songs. I knew that if I ever had a boyfriend I too would love passionately and break up passionately. My chances of acquiring a boyfriend were slim since I was too risk adverse to let any one know I liked them. I did have several meaningful (to me) long term unrequited crushes, but it wasn’t really wasn’t the same thing as a boyfriend. While my friends were out on dates I was home reading books and listening to music.

As a teenager I was an obsessive listener of music. I used music to change a mood or wallow deeper in a mood and custom made mixed tapes to fit every emotion. Before in was in a relationship with an actual boyfriend, I had already made dozens of versions of my ‘love gone good’ cassette. “Every breath you take” by The Police seemed so romantic to me that I started many tapes with this song. I somehow missed the fact that the lyrics were a bit creepy and stalkerish. When Mark Knopfler’s Romeo sang to Juliet, “when we made love you used to cry”, I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. I just knew I wanted to experience that much feeling. When Billy Bragg asked, “must I paint you a picture about the way that I feel,” I knew I wanted to paint my high school crush a picture about how I felt. But only if I could do it anonymously. I was a long way from being sexually active, but I hoped to someday channel Tina Turner and say to a man, “you must understand that the touch of your hand makes my pulse react.” Perhaps I would be a good communicator in the style of Chaka Kahn and let my man know that, “ain’t nobody loves me better, makes my happy, makes me feel this way.”

As much as I liked these ‘love gone good’ tapes, my ‘love gone bad’ tapes were even better. My favorite songs exposed raw, angry and devastated emotions. To the outside world I was a shy and slightly awkward young woman, but I knew I had a femme fatale, or at least a difficult woman, waiting to emerge. One day I wanted to be capable of such passionate emotions, and more importantly, inspire passionate emotions. I wanted to know that I made an impact. Maybe, like Stevie Nicks, I would beg someone to “stop dragging her heart around.” Or I would go Gloria Gaynor’s empowerment route and declare, “I’m not that chained up little person still in love with you.” One day I might be experienced enough with heartbreak to be detached like Deborah Harry and sing, “I once had a love and it was a gas; turned out I had a heart of glass.” I had some aspirations to be cooly independent like Casey Scott. To her unhappy ex she sang, “there’s no reason to assume the times I let you in my room meant as much to me as they did to you. Apparently.” I wanted my future ex-boyfriend to be despondent about my loss and agree with Rod Stewart that “someone like you makes it hard to live without someone else.” Maybe when dumped I would wallow like Bill Withers and croon, “ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone, only darkness every day.” But I hoped I would feel desperate about love and the lack of it. That like Sinead O’Conner, I wouldn’t take it lightly and wail “does she need you like I do? Does she hold you like I do? I’d kill a dragon for you.” I knew I had it in me to kill a dragon for someone if just given the chance.

In my early 20’s I had my first serious relationship. He was a well known lefty on campus that I had admired from afar. I was thrilled that he noticed me and asked me out. After our first date I wasted to time and made him a mixed tape. This was the first ‘love gone good’ tape I had given to a guy I liked. It was an excellent mix. The day after I gave him the mixed tape he told me he was up all night listening to it and rewound one song so many times he accidentally pressed record and ruined the song. The fact that he loved my mixed tape to such an intense degree directly correlated with my staying in the relationship much longer than was good for me. Right from the start of our relationship he told me that he loved me and that was enough information for me to ignore every red flag he then proceeded to wave about himself.

We had been together about four months when I was taken in for questioning as the prime suspect in a hit an run that left a young woman dead. Several hours into the good cop bad cop routine I started to feel fatalistic and thought I would wind up in jail. Eventually I was cleared and was able to go home. On my way home I couldn’t stop thinking about the young woman who was killed and the randomness of fate. I didn’t feel ready yet to talk to my rigidly lefty boyfriend since I knew he would be more interested in criticizing the police than hearing about how sad I felt. This would further confirm my growing suspicion that my boyfriend was really an asshole. When I got back to my apartment, I rummaged through my box of mixed tapes until I found one titled ‘loud women’. I put in the tape, turned the volume up all the way, lay back on my bed and listened. I wasn’t sure that I yet had it in me to end the relationship. But I did know for sure that when it did end it, the first track on my ‘love gone bad’ mixed tape would be Billy Bragg’s “valentines day is over”.