"love is a mix tape" by rob sheffield
You broke my heart and made me cry and here are twenty or thirty songs about it
I have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I'm always racing to catch up on my next favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. 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.
Is there any scarier word than "irreversible"? It's a hiss of a word, full of side effects and mutilations. Severe tire damage - no backing up. Falling in lofe...felt that way. I felt strange things going on inside me, and I knew that these weren't things I would recover from. These were changes tat were shaping the way things were going to be, and I wouldn't find out how until later. Irreversible.
I suddently reaolzed 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.
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 knwe how to go out, how to stay in, how to get things done, but that was it.
It's not human to let go of love, even when it's dead.
It's the same with people who say, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Even people who say this must realize the exact opposite is true. 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.
One smile from that magic man, and you're done.
I would keep living, and keep having new experiences, but none of them would compare to the old days. I would have to settle for a lonely life I didn't want, which would always remind me of the life I couldn't have anymore. 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 day.
What is love?
Great minds have been grappling with this question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to the Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. The stoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on the hoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary School parking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit "Love is Like Oxygen" - you get too much, you get too high, not enough and you're gonna die. 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.
I have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I'm always racing to catch up on my next favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. 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.
Is there any scarier word than "irreversible"? It's a hiss of a word, full of side effects and mutilations. Severe tire damage - no backing up. Falling in lofe...felt that way. I felt strange things going on inside me, and I knew that these weren't things I would recover from. These were changes tat were shaping the way things were going to be, and I wouldn't find out how until later. Irreversible.
I suddently reaolzed 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.
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 knwe how to go out, how to stay in, how to get things done, but that was it.
It's not human to let go of love, even when it's dead.
It's the same with people who say, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Even people who say this must realize the exact opposite is true. 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.
One smile from that magic man, and you're done.
I would keep living, and keep having new experiences, but none of them would compare to the old days. I would have to settle for a lonely life I didn't want, which would always remind me of the life I couldn't have anymore. 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 day.
What is love?
Great minds have been grappling with this question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to the Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. The stoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on the hoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary School parking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit "Love is Like Oxygen" - you get too much, you get too high, not enough and you're gonna die. 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.