We were two halves, each a side of a mix tape. Made up of songs that created us in our understanding of the other.
Yet your memory of me is a bootleg, a copy passed around by word of mouth. Continually copied until the reproduction was a new original you made of me in an act of collective forgetting; when the memory of the song was more powerful than the original.
How often did we have to respool the cassette when it caught in the tape deck; wind it back on with a pen jammed in the cogs? I doubt you’d recognise the original tune now that it’s stretched and warped.
I want you to press “Play” for old time’s sake. Would you?
A Fullness in Brevity - Adam Byatt 