Back in the day, we expressed our young love through mix tapes. Mix tapes were carefully curated and, when done right, became the ultimate love letter. When delivered to your love, they were given with a fair measure of angst. Would this mix tape be received with the same amount of feeling it was conveyed with? As a teenager, this was so stressful!
Make no mistake, the mix tape was a labor of love. Hours were spent agonizing over the perfect songs, the perfect order. Those songs needed to have MEANING.
The case also had to be something special. I pored over magazines, looking for ads that I could cut out and paste to the back of the paper cassette insert. Stolen artwork that would decorate the cover of the mix tape until the end of time. Or at least until the tape deck ate the ribbon and destroyed your analog love letter.
When technology advanced as it always does, I happily exchanged my cassette deck for a CD burner. That was some serious shit right there. Combine the CD burner with the burgeoning mp3 technology and you created a mix tape lover’s dream.
Fast forward a couple of decades and the landscape changed, rather dramatically. I am frankly still a bit salty that I purchased albums, then converted those albums to cassettes (it’s rather tough to listen to an LP on your Sony Walkman), then once again shelled out a silly sum of money to buy CDs for those SAME albums which I now have the pleasure of paying Spotify $19.99 a month to listen to. Let’s not unpack that, it will only make me mad.
I graduated from my mix tape/CD days a long, long time ago. I never thought that I’d even think about a mix tape again.
When I met my love, we began exchanging Instagram reels on a pretty regular basis and they were a fast way to get to know each other. We giggled over Aries reels; our ram personalities fit like puzzle pieces. We both enjoyed the “don’t fuck it up” chef (IYKYK) and other viral content. At the start of our relationship, we broke things off for a whopping 10 whole days. The reasons don’t matter anymore, but what does matter is that Instagram reels brought us back together paused for a hot minute.
Post breakup, I had unfollowed his account and he mine. But, one day my account had appeared once again on his list of DMs. It was a sign surely, though he was convinced I had done something with my uber-tech skills to cause it. Not so, but it opened the door and we have been happily sharing reels ever since.
We share funny reels, creating inside jokes along the way. We share political reels; we share a common loathing for the orange turd currently holding the highest office in the US. Side bar, when the news breaks that this piece of offal kicks the bucket, I know my who will be the recipient of my first call. We share sexy reels that remind us how in sync we are on all levels.
Those reels are a daily mix tape of a very different type. They are just as meaningful as those old mix tapes and a regular reminder of what we have built.
Resist Invisible 