My college boyfriend made me a mixed CD, and it remains one of the most romantic gifts I’ve ever received.
For me, music is the highest expression of language—its poetry set to a guitar riff, a piano chord, or a drumbeat. After we broke up, I remember angrily tossing a stolen T-shirt of his, letters, and the CD in the trash. Now I wish I had kept those items.
We ended things in 2014, and I moved across the country, hoping to distance myself from my feelings for him.
In Vancouver, the friend I was living with was invited to the TED Talks in Whistler. He took me as his plus one. One of the speakers was a man named Rives—an American storyteller, poet, and performance artist whose talk went viral.
He took us, the audience, on a beautiful journey, performing a piece about the most romantic thing that ever happened to him, which, not surprisingly, also involved a mixtape.
He described how, in 1996, Wisława Szymborska, a Polish author, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Rives was struck by one of her poems, titled Four in the Morning. My favourite lines are:
• Four in the morning.
• The hour from night to day.
•The hour from side to side.
• The hour for those past thirty…
Rives said he fell in love with the poem so deeply that he felt he must have read it before, though he couldn’t remember when or where. Suddenly, he began to see and hear “4 AM” everywhere he went. You know that feeling when you buy a new car, and suddenly, it seems like every car on the road is the same make and model? Rives experienced something like that—a haunting, persistent connection to the poem and the specific time of 4 AM.
His quest to uncover how he knew this poem led him to start a collection of 4 AM references from popular culture. It’s like when you don’t collect snow globes, but friends and family buy them for you so often that, before you know it, you have a collection.
Rives accumulated so many 4 AM references that he catalogued them into what he called “The Museum of Four in the Morning.” He published the collection online, and then—romantic forces of the universe at play—someone left a comment with the initials “LD,” saying, “Reminds me of an ancient mixtape.”
That comment struck him like a bolt of lightning. He instantly remembered where he had first read Szymborska’s poem.
LD was his college girlfriend, and they had shared a December-to-May romance. She had made him a mixtape, and instead of song titles, she used Dewey Decimal System numbers. Rives recalled taking his Walkman to the library and searching for the books by their Dewey entries.
Rives sat alone and read poems and short stories paired with songs LD had selected for him. One of those poems was Four in the Morning, paired with Paul Simon’s Peace Like a River.
Rives’ mixtape story was more romantic than mine, but it brought back all the feelings. The excitement of pressing play on your Walkman, not knowing what songs have been curated for you. The joy and surprise of discovering your partner’s song choices.
You swear the songs were written just for the two of you. I wish I could remember which songs were on the mixed tape that was made for me. I never should have thrown it away.
