Have you ever seen these?
You won't be familiar at all
Probably won't have any way of playing them
Me and my sister used to record on them
We were quite techy for the time
Now though you don't even own
You just stream
The filter dream
The complicated obsessive compulsive reactions
No thinking
Just yellow blobs of expression
No real depth
No real pain
You know I can recall a time where we sent letters
Not in the post always
But in lesson
Hand written
Pens, paper, little conversations
They were kept and treasured
There was never problems with memory and deleting files
They were never taken out of context
They were never shared and reshared and shown to a global world on some network of infinite WiFi
I can recall a time where we would just chill out
A blanket in the garden, a magazine about pop stars, or a sibling
We did chores the same, learnt to cook the same
But it was all physical contact
None of this social life over the Internet
None of this social media existence
We couldn't just delete a page
We were in real time
It was remembered
Getting drunk for the first time
Talking about real feelings
Staying up all night in each others company
Sitting with only the traffic as a background noise
Films on videos
Music on cassettes
Cds and dvds
Being out
Social distancing for us is not a norm
It never was
Being stuck inside
It's not easy for our generation
Well, as I said
These are cassettes
They stored all we wanted
You couldn't press repeat
We lived in the real time
