Open2it Community Blog

I found an audio tape from a friend, a letter by recorded voice.  It was really interesting to hear his voice, only 13-years-old, talking to me through time and space.  But what a shock, he suggests on the tape that we should use up this 90-minute tape by recording back-to-back to each other and then we could send it back and forth until the time is used up.  I thought to myself, ah, surely that didn't happen, because here I have the tape.

Surprise!  At the end of his talking, suddenly I heard my own.  I inform "him" that I had taped over something else I recorded two years ago, so that must've been my 15-year-old voice.  I could hear the puberty in my voice, plus a little cold.  I start out all over the place, trying to reconnect to this person I hadn't actually sent the tape back to during all that time, and in the end settle in to talking about the people I was now connected to in the new place.  I seemed to be explaining why I hadn't written, why I was kind of transitioning to California from Texas, and why my new connections were becoming stronger than the old ones.

I never did send that recording either.  It sat in my boxes, transferring from box to box until it ended up today in my car tape deck.  Maybe I was wrong to throw away all those letters I once carried from age thirteen to nineteen.  Perhaps my husband, then boyfriend, was right that I had to keep them forever.  I just know I would never forgive him for not being willing to share them with me one last time, when I was ready to let them go.  It was a ritual that I wanted to perform.  I knew at that moment he had decided to not walk beside me, and I had chosen loneliness.

Now I will choose a different path, perhaps also fraught with danger and suffering.  The wise say happiness is a state of mind.  I guess I'm perversely attracted to the sad and dark, whither I shall stay.