An artifact of truer times. 

Having worked in recording studios and used equipment that most people (including myself) could never afford; I posit with all personal and professional authority that nothing has ever sounded as breathtaking or felt so real as the standard General Motors tape deck in my red 1988 Chevy truck.  Little, lean, loyal, red.

There are many things wonderful and tragic in a person’s life.  Love, death, birth, the ocean.  I love music & I loved music in my truck.  I love the sound of it with the windows up in the cold.  I love the sound of it with the windows just cracked, and the way it feels when they’re down, the warm summer air pushes the notes past my face & back around my body over and over. I don’t just like it or enjoy it; I occupy it, as it occupies me.  It fills the space around me, changing the pressure of the local atmosphere.  It’s meteorological; surrounds me on all sides.  It puts me in the center of a hurricane; some kind of wonderful warm crazy hurricane whose strength & course are determined by the song, the air & my volume knob.  I feel it on my skin, hear it through my eyes as well as my ears.  I enjoy music with every sense.

At least I used to.  Ever since that truck left, and I subsequently left Minnesota, it has never sounded the same. It’s flat, thin, inorganic, unemotional, disingenuous. It has no temperature, no physicality, no depth, no ability to distort space or time, no warmth, no truth, no undefinable hidden source of energy.  I am unresponsive, apathetic.  An epic tragedy.  This is what it must feel like to fall out of love with the most wonderful person you’ve ever met.  Heart braking. Unexplainable. Un-understandable. Confusing. Terrifying. Deep.

Air might as well not be air, road, road.  There is no geometry.  No windshield, no cab wall, no draping roof fabric.  There is no vinyl seat or furry seat cover.  There is no tall shiny shift stick.  There is no broken-open vent.  No wheel without padding.  No having to manually grab a wire and touch it to the inside of the steering column to make the horn sound. No broken ignition that allows starting without keys.  No door locks to be opened by any key thin enough to fit inside.  But most importantly, there is no tape. No analog magnetic particle saturation among and across the tracks. There is no tape deck.  No simple three button operation.  No forward, back, side, eject.  No volume. No treble. No base.  There is no old worn out/(in) speaker.  No old worn in wire.  There is no humidity.  Is it humidity that tells a story?  It is tape and deck and speaker that tell a story.  We are our stories.  Our narratives.

Do you see that tape?  It tells a story.  Look at it.  It’s bent.  It’s case and body warped from being in that oven of a cab in that truck.  I never bothered to take it out, especially not on the hot days.  That’s when it was used the most.  I never bothered to take it out.  If you look carefully, you’ll see a strip of velcro on it’s back.  I never bothered to take it out because it lived there in that truck.  It was part of the vehicle.  Like the engine or the wheel. That truck wouldn’t work right without it.  It would start, move, take something from one place to another.  But that wasn’t the purpose of the truck. That was not it’s reason for being.  That truck was not just a vehicle for things.  A book isn’t just a vehicle for printed text, and plot; rather ideas, thoughts, emotions.  It could still be read, but without those things, it wouldn’t work.  So it was with that tape, that truck, that air.

I found it just now as I was digging through my closet.  The last piece of my truck that I have. The last piece left. This is what it must feel like to have the only person you love die and have their skeleton cleaned and kept in a box, only to have pieces taken away by life and circumstances until only a bone remains.  The last bone, maybe some part of the hand, a middle part of a finger, a piece of the tibia.  Or if you’re lucky, a vertebra.  A fragment reminder of the happiest partner, the tragedy of displacement, a physical trace, a broken connection back to the way it was meant to be.

I have never felt the same without you.