An Ode to the Mix CDs That Knew Before We Did

There's a photo of me that exists in the DMV's server somewhere. It's from a red light ticket, my first year of college, catching me zoning out, or honestly more like bed-rotting from behind the wheel. (The car was my dad's, which is why the ticket showed up at his house instead of mine.) I was headed to a Coldplay listening party at Tower Records, which would soon not exist, in a version of Los Angeles that would soon not exist either. "Yellow" had just come out. It was the most hopeful thing I'd connected to in months.

You know the mix CDs. Maybe even the cassette tapes before them. Sometimes they were a currency of community, something you made to be known by someone else. Sometimes they were a private ritual of isolation, something you made because no one else was there to know you. Either way, they were a love letter to someone's inner workings.

I swear, if I'd brought one to my psychiatrist, I could have saved myself years of misdiagnosis.