In the fall of 1999, I received a mix tape in the mail from someone I had an enormous crush on. It arrived sometime in October and I don’t think it left the deck of my boombox (shut up?) until its sequel showed up in the mail box the following February. This boy was a genius at crafting a most perfect mixtape and subsequently introduced me to a world of music outside the showtune realm. I am grateful to this day.

I suppose now, it’s somewhat laughable. It’s not a particularly “cool” mixtape. You know? It doesn’t include any songs by up and coming bands, no funky alternative rock, nothing like the mix CD I received not two years ago from the same person. Oh yes, the boy and I have evolved over years much like music formatting, cassette tapes to CD’s to playlists. We were an overwhelmingly in-love couple and then two heartbroken shattered souls and finally, two confused people who met up again and didn’t quite know what to do with each other, who probably should’ve just parted ways but didn’t know how to begin the separation, didn’t know how to severe that umbilical cord.

Me, especially. I didn’t know what I would do if the music stopped coming, if tapes stopped arriving in the mail, if CD’s stopped slipping into my bag with a wink and a knowing smile. Was not quite certain how I could survive without him, how I could learn to breathe on my own.

But of course, at seventeen, I had no idea how it would play out which is the most delicious thing about being seventeen. All I knew was that I had a mixtape catered to my innocent singer-songwriter tastes, full of soft sweet acoustic guitar music, James Taylor and Eric Clapton, a Rachmaninoff concerto on side B following a song the boy himself had written. He confessed to me a few years ago that he had forgotten all about that song, how to play it, what the words were.

I, of course, still know.

These tapes still live in the trunk of my car in a shoebox along with other remnants of another era, the era of actually purchasing music on cassette. There’s the apology take-me-back mixtape he made for me after he got drunk and kissed a girl at a college party. There’s the mixtape he made me in the dead of winter after watching Notting Hill, after feeling sentimental in a Julia Roberts kind of way. There’s a CD for my 18th birthday, a CD for no reason, a CD for every reason.

I’ve thought about taking some of the older things, the tapes, and making them digital. Perhaps I would write out the tracks and create a playlist and burn it on my iPod. But then…what would I call it? First Love October 1999? And what would be the point in even listening to it? I am guilty of popping it in the tape deck in my car this time of year, of cruising along with my teenage self in the passenger seat. But it’s less about filling an ache and more about attempting to hold onto a sweet memory. Less about wanting him back, more about smiling at what has been.

That’s what nostalgia is, isn’t it?

Ten years go by but really when the music is playing, it’s like no time at all. I’m on my stomach on the floor of my bedroom, knees lazily waving side to side, scribbling math homework in a notebook, the sun already gone at five o’clock. The smell of tomato sauce, garlic and olive oil, rising up from downstairs, my mother banging the wooden spoon on the side of the pot. The door opening from the garage, my father walking in from school, faded loafers, Newsday in hand.

Any second, someone will call that it’s dinnertime.

Come and help set the table.

I will bound down the stairs, place silverware neatly on folded napkins, all the while smiling and thinking of him.

And upstairs where no one can hear it, the music will end, a few seconds of silence will pass and then oh so very quietly, the tape will click off.