Reeling In

I am your trusty cassette tape, loaded with stories, purpose. I could be your favorite album or your disdained compilation; it’s the perspective that carries me home. I’m a victim of endless copies, fakes and imitations. I am the original. I am a work of art. I am played. I am stopped. I am paused, mid-sentence, mid-verse.I’ve been discarded, my reels twisted, frayed, damaged. The tape you place on me for a makeshift label is yellowing at the corners. It’s beleaguered, antiqued, and hardly legible. Words have been crossed out. Fresh phrases penciled in almost too methodically. It’s the final product that matters, and it’s the complete picture you treasure. I am placed on deck; I am always waiting for my spokes to spin, moving for the sake of motion, to get somewhere. You travel along my roads every day, hearing the words almost echo through your skull with deafening vibrato, memorable, irrevocable. The reels drag from overuse. The playback is messy, incoherent, dodgy. But it’s the flaws you’ve grown to expect, close to home like warmth and security, familiar sounds that only remind you of me. The click resounds through the room; the first side has reached its conclusion. I am flipped over, I am reversed. With the one-eighty comes one-eighty degrees of a new perspective. There’s a whole other side to me. All you have to do is listen.