The Mixtape

I’ve only ever made one mixtape.

I thought this person was pretty special. So I sat upstairs in my brother’s bedroom, on his multi-disc CD player — the one with three trays, that he would have gone absolutely ballistic about if he’d caught me touching it — and I curated songs for hours.

I wasn’t even sure he’d like them. I wasn’t all that sure about my own taste, if I’m honest. But I knew I liked them, and somehow that felt like enough to go on.

I didn’t tell a soul I was making it.

The next day, at school, I gave it to him.

Years later — I’d have been late teens, early twenties by then — I saw him again, in a nightclub of all places. He told me he still had it.

Still had the mixtape, all that time later.

I’m forty-two now. I wonder if he kept it. I wonder what was even on it.

I’m married now, to a man who is brutally, unflinchingly honest about how bad my music taste actually is. Which makes me wonder about that mixtape differently than I used to.

Were the songs genuinely terrible, curated by a teenager with no idea what she was doing? Or did the sentiment behind it simply outweigh whatever was actually on the tracklist?

Either way, I can’t remember a single song.