Sexeteria

Well, much has happened since I decided to take my break--some big and unpredicted disruptions (like unexpectedly getting laid off), and some small and encouraging glimpses of things I'd hoped to gain through taking a break. All in all, though, both the disruptive and the planned for will ultimately help life move forward to what I hope is a more positive place.

Because life does move on, and if it's going to, it might as well move on to a pleasant wood rather than a thorny forest.

I bring this up because what I'm doing tonight is reminding me quite strongly of how life does move on.

Tonight I decided to do something radical. I decided to throw out all my cassette tapes I'd collected from my childhood onward (until the time I went digital).

This may not seem like such a big deal to you. But for me, it is akin to throwing away old photographs of friends and old love letters from former lovers.

Music has always been a huge part of my life. I always knew this to some extent. But lately, I've begun to realize just how incredibly important it's been. Looking through these hundreds and hundreds of cassettes I have, I realize that it's literally been a means of survival for me during many, many parts of my life. And every single little box I pick up tonight documents in my memory a particular time in my life, a particular feeling, a particular person or situation. I've never been one to keep a regular diary of my daily comings and goings. It's these cassettes that have done it for me; and looking through them, I can remember the girl I was, and the woman I turned into, and how exactly that happened.

It's in everything:

Jewel case inserts I meticulously designed with cut-out scraps from colorful magazine photos and calendars, sitting by my roommate's stereo as I dubbed albums to cassette.

Tapes with song lists written in the hand of old boyfriends who have been long lost to me.

A live Duran Duran concert taped obsessively off the local top-40 radio station, the background thick with the wind-like sound of a hundred thousand teenage girls letting out a never-ending scream.

A tellingly transitional self-made tape with Wham! on one side and Fear on the other.

An entire Elvis Costello discography, with each case insert colored with a different shade of highlighter--still almost as bright now as the day I created them back in the 80s.

The Cocteau Twins. Hearing them for the first time, when I came over to have dinner in a candlelit apartment with two women who would soon become my college apartment-mates.

The Dear Johns. An obscure English band my best friend saw in a pub and sent to me from overseas, when I was missing her very much.

Husker Dü - Flip Your Wig. Staying up at college in the summer after the semester was over. Because I just didn't want to go home, and wishing I didn't have to at all. Sitting in a house with friends, realizing that I was finally able to be the kind of person I was, with the kind of people I wanted to be it with. A freak and an outsider. And very happy about it. Knowing (thinking, then, at least) it was the ultimate in cool.

Gang of Four. Driving insanely fast on a country road on a sunny new spring day, in a car full of boys and girls with hardcore haircuts, angry piercings, 12-hole steel-toe Doc Martens, and torn up army jackets and flannel shirts. The wind whipping through what was left of my shorn hair, the man coming through the speakers screaming, "Your kiss so sweet/your sweat so sour"...

And then. Coming across a homemade cassette with the House of Love on one side and the soundtrack to Something Wild on the other side. Not recognizing the handwriting on the insert. Opening the box and finding a simple yet incredibly touching note written on the inside from an old friend who I'm no longer in touch with. And suddenly remembering after all these intervening years the first time I'd read that note--when I opened the cassette for the first time on an airplane, flying away from a country and a life I couldn't bear to part with, flying toward one I suspected I couldn't bear. Seeing that note and knowing someone back there loved me.

I wasn't one to be sentimental back then. And yet, this note made me tear up, sitting there alone on that plane.

Now that I'm older, I find I am more affected by sentiment and nostalgia than my younger self was. My younger self would have rolled her eyes at my older self tonight.

But Colin, if you're out there somewhere, I read your note again. And you made me cry twice.

Throwing away these cassettes is turning out to be harder than I thought it was going to be. Touching each of them is like touching down into a moment of my past. It's hard to let these touchstones to my history go, tossed into the garbage like something worthless. And also, on some level, I know I'm afraid without the physical solidity of the tapes themselves--without seeing the varied handwritings of old friends, of or my own handwriting as I went from a child to an adult, or the cracks and scratches and markings on the boxes and tapes themselves that remind me of particular incidents--that I'll lose my ability to access all that history and the emotions attached to it, the way I'd forgotten that moment on the plane until I picked up the cassette again.

But it's okay. It's time. They're taking up space I've needed to free up for a long while now.

And, you know, even if they're gone, they're still walking in me...still talking in me...