based on a true story

There are boxes in my apartment that I haven't opened since I moved in here. I had vague recollections of their contents; knew that they held old letters, stickers, bank statements and birthday cards, items that I did not need but couldn't throw away. When I sat at my old desk, I used to prop my feet up on a stack of packages from Amazon that had long been emptied of their original books and were now refilled with floppy disks, flyers and postcards for mixtapes that I never made. And when I bought a new desk and donated its predecessor to the local Salvation Army, I thought that it would be a good excuse to rummage through my stuff and seperate the memories that I wanted to keep from the trash that I was simply too lazy to throw away.

It was a nice thought, but it took me a couple of months to actually follow up on it. I kept most of the displaced boxes in the spare bedroom until last Friday, when LittleSister asked me to move them out for an impromptu visit from OlderSister. I shifted them all into my bedroom and resolved to have them sorted out by Sunday. And it was on Sunday night that I found myself in my room, slicing open lengths of packing tape and proceeding to dig.

I meant to focus on just getting rid of the trash, but you know how these things go. I pulled out an old binder from a high school Western Civ. course and flipped it open to a page of notes written in a neat script. The penmanship looked strange, foreign, and I wondered whose notes they were. Then I realized that they were mine, and that before word processors and a 70 wpm typing rate, I possessed a cursive style with pudgy l's and svelte t's.

The notes were about the Counter-Reformation and in the margins I had scribbled quotes from Mr. Baker and my various classmates, sparking memories from ten years ago of spirited classroom debates between cocky upstart boys and their cockier neo-hippy teacher. And as I continued to dig through, I found my mind separating artifacts into historical periods. oh, yeah, this thank-you note was from The Shelter Years. I bought these bookplates in a used bookshop in Wellesley during my junior year.

However, it wasn't the stack of high school scribblings that did me in, nor was it the collection of zines and DIY comics that I collected in college. It was far later on in the night, that I found the tin of Japanese cookies that held all of my old mixtapes and I went into the kitchen to listen to them on our sole remaining cassette player. That's what ruined my hopes of reducing all of my clutter that night.

OlderSister was in the kitchen as well, reading through my copy of The Salon Reader's Guide, and she looked up when she heard the opening strains of My Bloody Valentine's "Soon"

"Holy shit, man -- flashback city -- you still have this tape?"
"Just found it while cleaning out my room. Here wanna see the --"

she pulled the cassette case out of my hand

"-- track listing?"
"... wow ... 'Lambrusco Cowboy' by 808 State. I don't think I even remember how that one sounds."
"it's the one with the Bjork guest vocals and sounds like a cheesy 80s videogame."
"oh, that really narrows it down."

We sat and listened to the tape, our reverie interrupted by the occasional request to replay a Happy Monday's song or fast forward to a particular Pet Shop Boys tune. We listened to it once through and as I popped it out, I said, without looking up "I don't think I ever thanked you for giving that to me way back when, but, uh, yeah, thanks. It made a big difference."

"I know," she said, turning back to her book, "you haven't listened to much else since."