A Million Words Couldn't Say Just How I Feel, A Million Years From Now You Know, I'll Be Loving You Still

--"Nobody Knows", The Tony Rich Project

There exists a few audio cassettes of me singing classic 80's and 90's R&B songs. Precious few have heard them and if you ask me directly I'll probably disavow their existence. In fact, I'm pretty sure the magic number has been limited to such that I could count it on one hand. Also, I'm pretty sure there is only one person in the world who can actually play them whenever she wants. As far as treasures go, they're not all that valuable. The tapes probably cost me less than five dollars. The price was mostly done in the short spurts of ten or twenty minutes during which I recorded the songs as well as the monologues that bookend the song. But as far as one person doing something foolish to express a heartfelt, then they're certainly priceless.

I remember the first one I gave was well back in 1996. We'd already been friends for almost two years by then. We were also well use to sending one another little care packages in the mail, which sometimes included special greetings or short monologues about what was currently going in our lives. It broke up the monotony of writing e-mails and snail mail back and forth. It also served to have something permanent as to the sound of each other's voices.

Well, around her sixteenth birthday, it occurred to me that it would make a sweet present if I sang of those significant love songs that approximated how I felt about her at the time. We always joked that we had the worst singing voices, yet on the phone it would sometimes end up that we would mockingly serenade one another with whatever song was popular at the time. It wasn't so much that I loved the way her voice flowed (or her mine), but there was something sweet about her saying those words, even in jest, to me. The way I looked at it, she was saying it to me. That's all that mattered. People may joke and kid around with songs, but there's a bit of truth in lyrics when they're directed towards someone. That's my theory anyway. I certainly most of what I sang to her on those nights. I mean--why not? If she didn't like it, I could always pass it off as me joking around. If she did, then it was that much easier for me to muddle through and for her to digest.

1996 was the first year I dared actually save it for posterity for her. Before then it was a matter of my being worried that somehow my feelings might change. By 1996, though, I was fairly certain that they weren't. And I thought I could give her another present, yet something as personal as a tape of me talking and singing directly to her, she would have to know that's not something I just do everyday.

And it still isn't.

"Nobody Knows" just happens to be on that first tape. I must say my rendition if pretty crappy. I don't believe in key and I think I fumbled the words more than once. The important thing, she says, is that I went through the whole thing. I didn't laugh. I didn't try to sound all cutesy. I sang it straight and true, and I let it stand as it was--one person expressing how he felt for another.

I don't send her a tape every year. That'd be stupid. But every couple of years I'll send her another tape for her birthday. It's always four or five songs, pretty obnoxiously sweet songs that most men have no business singing, but I always manage to sneak in when I'm at karaoke or something. I believe that's what gets me through karaoke nights, aside from the alcohol, the fact I'm always singing to a certain someone when I do sing. The embarrassment is mitigated when I can fool myself into thinking it's dedicated to someone. I don't feel as much as an idiot when it feels like I'm just saying something I already know to be true in my heart.

Sure, for a long time I've gotten her some fairly worthwhile gifts--a watch last year, a necklace a few years before that, &c...--but it's my contention that somehow she appreciates the tapes more. They're more unique and I think they feel more like something I would do.

Even when like this year as she's turning the big twenty plus ten and I'm feeling down on myself that my unemployed state leaves me ill-equipped to honor the achievement to the degree she deserves, I know I can always make and send off another tape. I mean--I'm kind of angry that I can't be there and I can't send her anything huge without busting my budget to show my undying affection her. By now, however, I suppose she knows. The only thing I can do is perhaps sing a little song that puts into a few words what trinkets, tokens, and object d'arts usually vocalize for me. The only thing I can do is perhaps remind her that there's a part of me that remembers when she laughed at my first tape... and also remembers that she's kept that one and all the rest of them neatly tucked away in one of her dressers till this day.

If I can't buy her something nice this year, the very least I could do is do something nice for her I believe.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers