I’m doing another challenge!

This time, it’s the Index Card A Day challenge and basically, all you have to do is produce something creative on an index card every day until the end of July. I love index cards and I love having a reason to doodle so I am running with it.

I’ve decided that I’m going to use each card to tell a little story. Some of them will be fiction, some with be true stories about things I remember and some will be based on stories I like to tell when I perform.

I may or may not use the prompt each day (or the weekly theme) but I did use it today.

Here’s my ‘mixtape’ index card.

And here’s the story.

I know that some people used to make a VERY BIG DEAL out of creating and receiving mixtapes. That wasn’t a thing for me per se but there was one tape that was very important for me.

Before The Man and I are starting seeing each other, we were just friends. I had gotten out of a horrible relationship that took a huge emotional toll on me and it was a bit of a struggle for me to remember who I was outside the context that my ex had constructed for me.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Man’s company though and we would drive around for hours most evenings with me lying down in the passenger’s seat, looking through the sunroof at the streetlights zipping by and pouring my heart out about how hurt I was, how empty I felt, how much I felt cheated by the time I had lost in that relationship. The Man listened, reminded me that I was kind and good and not at all at fault, and when I had cried it all out for that evening, we would turn on the music and just listen and drive.

We listened to all kinds of stuff. I remember listening to Tom Petty, to Concrete Blonde, and to hours and hours of radio. Then, at one point, a couple of weeks into this routine, The Man puts a mixtape into the machine in his car and lets it play.

Now, to be fair to me, I was never the kind of dame that guys made mixed tapes for. And the songs on the tape were playing on the radio on a fairly regular basis. And we listened to all kinds of tapes both of us had already owned – stuff recorded off the radio, stuff from other tapes at home – so it didn’t occur to me that this tape was special in any way.

In fact, we had a little routine of jokingly arguing about one song from the tape. I don’t remember the whole list of songs but I remember enough for the argument to make sense.

In my opinion, Level 42’s ‘Something About You’ didn’t belong with Sting’s ‘I Burn For You’, U2’s ‘All I Want Is You’ and Bryan Adams’ ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ because it was a whole different tempo, a whole different style of song. There was fun, but no yearning, in that one – at least in my mind.

After a while, The Man and I stumbled into a conversation that led to THAT CONVERSATION and we realized that our friendship was something more than that. Something a lot more. Something that is, to this day, one of the cornerstones of my life.

It was years later, when we were driving across the country to move to Winnipeg for me to go to grad school and we were listening to every tape in our collection, that I finally heard the message that was in the mixtape.

He was right, of course, ‘Something About You’ fits in perfectly.

I may not have gotten the message from the tape, but, luckily, I got the message very clearly from the man.

And, there is still ‘Something About’ him that makes this whole adventure work very, very well.