CASSETTE FROM MY EX

In the spring of 1999, I spent a two-week-long senior-year Spring Break with my college boyfriend at his house in Maine. It was an odd place to go for Spring Break— we had to drive through mounds of snow on the way up— but it was cozy all the same. His parents were gone, and our friends were going to join us for the second week, which turned into a debacle of Beer Pong in the garage and games of Asshole at the dining room table.

In that first, quiet part of the break though, we were watching the NCAA basketball tournament. That didn’t end well. I grew up in Chapel Hill and am a die-hard North Carolina fan, and he was— and is, I’m sure— a Dookie. Carolina was out in the first round that year (Weber State?! WTF?) and I moped around the house blaming him and his Blue Devil kind for all of life’s woes.

But Wilco’s “Summerteeth” had just been released, and what revived me after my Tarheels’ painful loss was making a harrowing drive to the music store to pick it up, sliding along the ice-covered Bangor roads. Then we listened to the album over and over again.

Until the night we got to playing cards. Crazy 8s was a game my dad always loved, and I thought I had skills. We were up in my boyfriend’s father’s office, which was filled with shelves and shelves of CDs. “Summerteeth” is a fantastic album, but it was getting old, so we decide to make our card game musical. You win a hand, you choose a song for the “Crazy 8s” mixtape. It was collaborative, you see.

Except that I barely won a round— thank goodness. I realize now when I look back on these songs that every single good tune on there was his pick. The lame ones (“Ice Cream,” two Wallflowers songs?, Hootie for God’s sake?!)? All me. Maybe that’s why this tape feels unbalanced and imperfect, with a little sadness in between the lines. We knew we’d break up at graduation, which was just two months away.

After our split, he sent me a postcard that I have pasted in my diary. It said a lot of things, but the last line, referencing our time together, read, “It was all oddly refreshing, I guess.”

This oddly refreshing mix will always remind me of snowy Spring Break ’99.

Melissa Walker is a writer who has worked as ELLEgirl Features Editor and Seventeen Prom Editor. In the name of journalism, she has spent 24 hours with male models and attended an elite finishing school for girls in New Zealand, among other hardships. She writes Young Adult novels in Brooklyn, which is a great place to never grow up. Her latest book is Violet by Design.