Images Allowing Me to Let Go of THINGS

This winter has been about organizing and letting go of material items. There are quite a few things that I have been dragging around with me to home after home. One of those things was a box full of old mix tapes. In high school making mix tapes was one of my favorite things to do. That was preceded by middle school where my friend Brittney and I would have a blank tape ready in the boom box so that when our favorite song came on the radio we would be ready to record! So as I was cleaning and discarding I came across the cassettes, I popped them in to my stereo (yes I still have a tape deck) one by one, only to be greeted with total audio mush. None of them sounded like they did in the 90s. Some of them just slowly unwound themselves inside the tape deck with the dramatic orange backlighting serving as a knife rotating in my side as I watched hours of creative teen energy dissolve into useless plastic. At that point Aaron suggested that I toss the defunct tapes. His solution for my attachment to them was to take a picture before throwing them in the trash. So I dropped a few on the floor and I took some pics. Incidentally, this is also what I did last year when moving from my Monument apartment when I was having a hard time letting go of my late grandmother's ancient blender. It barely worked and the lid was missing, but it is the only relic I had left from her other than a broken rosary. Aaron was right then, I didn’t need the blender and having a photo of it felt just as good to me as actually having it in the kitchen cabinet. However, the same is not true of the cassette tapes. Shortly after that day, I was at the Valley Mall with my niece Christmas shopping. Since she is nine, stopping at Claire’s Boutique was a MUST. With my soul still smarting from the loss of my cassette tapes I was forced to face myriad tween accessories and products FEATURING images of cassette tapes. I guess they are trendy now? With the way mine fared I don’t see how that is possible, but anyways. I now have started a practice (that I can tell will be lifelong) of taking photos of things as I say goodbye, which is probably what I will do with my Polaroid once the film really and truly is impossible to find. How will I take a Polaroid of a Polaroid? Deep man. Deep.