Behold the mix tape: the ultimate tool of subtle communication. Using the music of others, you can record your own special message for posterity. I mixed tapes for crushes, boyfriends, and co-ed car trips. Each felt deeply significant and emotionally naked. As I passed the tape to the intended recipient, I had the thrilling fear of being found out. He will hear this tape, I thought, and know exactly how I feel about him. He will understand exactly what I am trying to say with this cryptic yet meaningful selection of music and lyrics. He will immediately grab his coat and run from his house to my door. Failing that, he will pick up the phone and call.
In reality, it never worked out that way. Or if my message was obvious, it was ignored. But each time I mixed a tape, I had the fear. The fear of laying myself bare and being rejected. Wasn’t I being rejected if the message was ignored? This misses the point. The beauty of indirect communication - of the mix tape or the book quote, or the e-mail, or whatever - is that if there is no response, you can delude yourself into believing that the person just didn’t get it. And that isn’t rejection. That is oblivion.
Of course no one wants to be rejected. Putting yourself on the line emotionally is a terrifying thing. It takes confidence and maturity which few people have in equal and sufficient measure. Including me. So for the better part of my short life, I have chosen to communicate indirectly with the objects of my affection.
The most harrowing of the mix tape experiences was with my father’s best friend’s son. He was 14 or 15 that summer when he came to stay with his father down the road, bringing his surly teenage attitude and a collection of U2 and oldies that made him seem worldly wise and mature. I was smitten instantly and thoroughly. I must have been 11 or 12. I begged him to make me tapes of the music he listened to constantly. Then I spent hours analyzing every song. I found hidden messages woven in and out of the lyrics, even the order of songs. I pined the way you can when all you know about love comes from the books you’ve read and the movies you’ve seen.
A few weeks later Mark told my best friend and I that he was dating Casha, a girl his age who had been our babysitter in the not-so-distant past. Suddenly the line was drawn clearly. I was the kid sister, not the girl of his dreams. The hurt was so deep to my pre-teen ego that I reacted with anger for the remainder of the summer. It took years before I could communicate with him in a semi-normal way. Each time I saw him I thought of the embarrassment of the mix tapes, and imagined him laughing at my childish attempts to win his affection.
Mix tapes gave way to cds, cds became instant messages on ICQ. There was even one memorable bus courtship via graphing calculator, which is a funny story for another day. I still kept journals filled with earnest love letters that never found their way to envelopes or mailboxes. I wrote out all of the things I couldn’t muster the courage to say. A cynic might suggest that’s the reason I went into journalism in the end: I was always more comfortable observing from a safe distance and recording it with words. My very own personal record of history.
By university I had resorted to e-mail to convey my deepest feelings. I agonized over wording, punctuation, and length. I took great pains to spare myself from immediate rejection. If you type out how you feel, it can always be denied, or denounced as a momentary lapse of judgment or the result of too much wine. I know that seems completely illogical, and it is. You can never truly take it back. But far better to put distance between yourself and your feelings, I thought, than to lay it on the line and risk immediate and decisive rejection.
My penchant for obtuse and subtle messages landed me in plenty of unfortunate romances. I wandered through my undergraduate years aimlessly. I looked for the brightest hope in every man I dated. I slow danced in dorm rooms, answered the apartment door late at night as if I’d been expecting visitors, checked my e-mail in crowded libraries. I looked high and low for an undeniable flash of instant connection. And then I discovered finally and cruelly that when you think you’ve found it, the indirect route is not the one to take.
I wallowed in the failure of my former tactics for the better part of a semester. I presumed the opportunity lost forever and mourned it accordingly: with rambling journal entries and overly analytic girl talk. I thought I would die of embarrassment because I had to see him so regularly. And every time I did, I kicked myself for being so stupid.
Eventually, though, you think you have recovered from these things. Months pass. You meet someone new and wonderful. You find the hint of lightning and begin to believe that perfect romance does not exist, that this is in fact what you have been looking for all along.
The truth is you can never really know if you’ve made the right choice. You can only know with some degree of certainty that you have made the best choice for you, for now. And if you get a chance to alter the course of your previous decisions, it is by turns horrible and illuminating.
The only thing worse than a missed opportunity is to miss it a second time, when you know better. You have to take it as it comes and lay it on the line, or spend the rest of your life trying to forget your cowardice. Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and jump.
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