The B-side of an old cassette tape usually held one's true feelings
While tidying up the closet at my parents' house, I found an old cassette tape.
The label simply said "For Driving" in ballpoint pen ink that had already faded. It wasn't my handwriting. It was something a friend from college had made for me. I listened to it many times when we went to the beach in his car.
Feeling nostalgic, I went to the trouble of securing a playback environment (this was a real struggle; cassette decks are now almost in the realm of archaeology), and I tried listening to it.
The A-side was just as I remembered.
Songs that were popular at the time, songs everyone knew, songs for singing along to at the top of your lungs with the car windows rolled down. The selection was bright, flawless, and sociable.
In a way, it was structured like a well-made business card.
However, the moment I flipped it to the B-side, the atmosphere changed.
A foreign band I had never heard of. A quiet piano piece. A long, long instrumental with almost no lyrics. And finally, a ballad with a raspy voice that seemed quite old from the perspective of who we were back then.
The selection was completely different from the A-side. Or rather, this was probably the real him.
Come to think of it, it was a natural structure.
When you play a tape, it always starts from the A-side. That's why you put what you want people to hear on the A-side. Outward-facing, foolproof songs. But only those who stuck with the A-side until the end would reach the B-side. I think it was designed (consciously or unconsciously) so that you could show a little bit of yourself to someone who had come that far.
True feelings are always written on the back, in small print.
And I think that people also have an A-side and a B-side.
The voice we use in meetings and the music we listen to alone late at night. The weekends we post on social media and the weekends we don't.
It's not a question of which one is the real one. The A-side isn't a lie, either. It's just that the order in which they are played is fixed.
The problem is that we are so busy every day that we only listen to each other's A-sides and assume, "I know him." It takes time to flip the tape. About as much time as a long drive to the beach.
I haven't seen that friend in nearly twenty years.
It's not about the light at the bottom of a pool, but I probably won't see him again in the future either. But that summer, he let me listen to his B-side. I wonder if I truly received it.
The raspy-voiced ballad ended, and the tape continued to spin in silence for a while. With a click, it stopped.
I took the tape out, looked at the writing on the label one more time, and then put it in my drawer instead of throwing it away.
I felt that as a storage format for true feelings, this was much more reliable than the cloud.
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