I called it Love Mix ’87.
A title that aimed to become a great love story and instead remained nothing more than proof of my overwhelming teenage optimism.
I made it for her, and the story went more or less like this.
There was me, my portable stereo, and a hot August afternoon.
I had met her on the beach; she was part of that group of friends that, within a few weeks, would scatter to the four winds.
Everyone would go back home, back to school, homework, early alarms, and landline calls that were always busy.
I saw her every day, but I could already feel time pulling at the sleeves of my T-shirt.
That’s when it happened.
One day we were at the beach bar, eating a Cucciolone.
She was laughing at the little joke printed on the biscuit, one of those so terrible they became brilliant out of sheer stubbornness.
Mine, of course, said something like: “If you want to impress someone… try again tomorrow.”
A sign. Algida understood it long before I did.
She looked at me and, with the casual cruelty of someone dropping atomic bombs without noticing, asked:
“If you were a song, which one would you be?”
And I—never ready for the right questions—mumbled something like:
“I don’t know… maybe a hidden track. That way, if you don’t like me, you can pretend you never heard me.”
She almost never laughed, but that time she did.
That laugh planted the idea of making her a mixtape.
Not a simple list of songs, but a disguised confession, a sort of secret code between people who care for each other without knowing how to say it.
I chose the songs with surgical precision:
– something about emotional confusion
– something about tangled hearts
– something about running away (just in case)
– and finally a slow, endless song, perfect for pretending not to look into each other’s eyes
There were:
– With or Without You by U2
– Never Gonna Give You Up (which wasn’t ironic yet—it was practically a lifetime contract)
– Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper, queen of awkward silences
It took me a whole day.
Half of it spent trying to rescue the tape after it twisted itself inside the player.
My heart did the same.
When I handed it to her, all I said was:
“It’s a mix. For… I don’t know, when you go to school.”
She took it, turned it in her hands, looked at the crooked title on the paper sleeve and said:
“Why is it called Love Mix? That’s a bit… much.”
I almost died.
I answered:
“I recorded over one of my sister’s old tapes. She’d kill me if she found out!”
Total lie.
Every word of it.
The funny part?
She tried it right away in her Walkman.
Halfway through the first song, the tape twisted like a climbing plant.
A sign that the universe was already laughing at me.
A perfect metaphor: at that moment my heart was tangled exactly like that tape.
Summer ended soon after, and we drifted apart in the classic ’80s way: no messages, no follows, no likes.
Just distance, and that soft melancholy you wear like a sweatshirt when the wind starts picking up.
Years later I understood that some stories aren’t made to work out: they’re made to stay in your head, just like those mixtapes you could never throw away—even when they were broken.
And today, when I look at this T-shirt, I’m reminded that love is often exactly like that:
a tangle.
But one that sounds beautiful.