Mix tapes were how we flirted.
Ninety minutes, no undo button, and every song a sentence you couldn't take back.
A playlist takes four minutes to assemble and costs nothing. A mix tape took an evening, and it cost you the tape, and if you made a mistake at minute thirty-eight you either lived with it or started over.
That constraint was the whole medium. You had to commit. You had to decide, in advance and in order, what you wanted somebody to feel and when. Track one was a handshake. Track four was where you took the risk. Side B, song two, was where you put the thing you could not say out loud, buried far enough in that you could deny it if you had to.
There was labor in it that the recipient could see. The handwriting on the insert. The abbreviations when a title didn't fit. The last thirty seconds of side A left blank because nothing you owned was exactly the right length, and that silence was its own small confession.
Nobody said "I like you." You said, here are eleven songs, and I thought about you during all of them, and now you have to sit through it in order because that is how the format works.
The modern equivalent is instantaneous and infinite and can be edited after the fact, which means it can also be walked back. Something in the risk is gone. You cannot accidentally reveal yourself in a medium with an undo button.
“The gift wasn't the songs. The gift was the ninety minutes you spent making it.”
Otherwise Ordinary publishes original fiction and invented reporting. Names, places and businesses in this piece are made up.
