Life With Objects

I can’t find them, but I can still picture them, sitting in a bag on the floor of my old bedroom, about twenty or so, most containing my own block print and notations like “acoustic version”. (“Who says ‘acoustic’ now?” asked my best friend. “It’s ‘unplugged,’ you know.”). I’ve searched my parents’ attic, vainly hoping that they were saved along with the Strawberry Shortcake dolls and class projects, not simply discarded when my bedroom became a home office. I’d swap my entire iTunes library for these missing glimpses of me at sixteen, seventeen, twenty.

Blues and bootlegs from a high school crush, his sloppy boyish cursive giving me a secret thrill. Another that my old boyfriend mailed to my dorm room, a year or so after we broke up (the accompanying note read: “why am I still afraid of your dad?”). “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” was easy enough, but was I overanalyzing that Operation Ivy song? And I hated to admit, you had to hand it to a guy who could mix Tony Bennett and punk and make the whole thing seamless. My freshman roommate decorated her contribution to my collection with a collage that slid between the case and the liner; an ingenious move that I copied for every mix tape I produced thereafter. Inside was a microcosm of nineties girl cool, from Ani DiFranco to the Murmurs.

Then there are ones given in grateful exchange, crafted during afternoons spent hunkered down at the stereo in an endless cycle of record-rewind-record-rewind, trying to cramp “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on one of those tiny lines with a fine tip pen. I want them back, want to ask everyone to check their parents’ attics. A lost cause, I know; also gone is the perfect jogging companion (some Alice in Chains, Archers of Loaf) that I borrowed and then so foolishly returned to my college boyfriend. I ended up marrying the guy, and he came with a silver pick-up and a few pieces of furniture but no mix tapes.

It’s OK, I guess. Really, what would I do with a bag of old cassettes? My car doesn’t even have a tape player. As though technological developments deliberately kept pace with my own, CD-Rs slowly began to replace mix tapes toward the end of college; the computer I purchased my senior year came with a CD burner. Yet it went unused. I have a few random mix CDs, but their typed sticky labels and printed liners leave me cold. But perhaps in another few years, I’ll wax nostalgic about those as CDs become the quaint precursors to all else digital. Just in case, I’ve got them safely stored away.

They say it isn’t until after the funeral that reality begins to set in. Perhaps the strangest days are right on the brink of that change. The ham is starting to go bad. In the kitchen the paper plates are stacked in the corner. The flowers' scent is fading as their petals, still full in the middle, turn brown around the edges. The immediate family is still in town. There is a slight sense of guilt inside each of them for wanting to get on with it, to go back to normal, mixed with the knowledge that they never will.

That cocktail of emotions hung above us as we began to pack up my aunt’s room so that my mom could move into it. We stood in the doorway of the room; arms crossed, and peered inside.

“This is weird to do so soon, but I just want to go ahead and be in the room next to Zoey’s.”

“It’s not weird, Mom, let’s just get it over with.”

“I know, but I feel strange.”

“Is it ever going to not feel strange?”

“Ok, let’s go.”

And so it began. I scooped up old heels from the closet floor that I never remember seeing on my aunt, especially in those last days when her cancer had reduced her to those socks with the rubber grips on the bottom. She actually really liked those stupid socks saying “Man, I’d keep getting chemo forever if they keep giving me these socks.” Hearing her say that again in my head made me snicker as I shoved all those shoes into a garbage bag to head to the Goodwill.

I pulled big, tattered shirts from the drawers. Now these I remembered. I remember this blue and white stripped shirt with a white collar, quite fashionable in the late-nineties, when she brought Zoey home from the hospital, adopting her as a single thirty-something, bright blue eyes full of love, hope, promise, shock and a bit of healthy fear. Fear was not a common expression for her, even when tubes were guiding fluid out of her stomach because it was no longer working. Actually, I saw her jump off cliffs, drive like a crazy lady, dance as she was dying. I only remember seeing a bit of fear as she held her newborn. I folded the shirt and heard sniffles coming from my mother behind me.

“Let’s turn on some music.”

“Sounds great,” I said as I wiped my nose.

Mom walked over to the tape player on the nightstand beside what would now be her bed. She popped open the player and saw a home-recorded tape with no markings. She shut the tape deck and hit play. It was a rock song and the first lyrics were “Hey, Sister don’t cry.”

For a brief moment, Mom and I stared at each other, mouths agape. Then we smiled, shook our heads and laughed.

“That bitch,” Mom chuckled.

And then we wept.