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The Cassette Winds

In the year of echo and edge—1984—

they flung wide the hall doors into neon dusk,

paper diplomas fluttering like low-stakes prophecy,

the world humming below cassette hiss and hopeful static.

Shoes scuffed in gym-floor friction, they stepped off

the edge of instruction into the wide,

thrumming halt of possibility.

Youth was rotary then, turning circles slow, deliberate,

dialing into futures that clicked

between radio forecasts and laser-disc dreams.

Each year since— like the ribbon unspooled

from a mixtape love letter—

has slid over the reel of time:

some songs faded, some stayed.

We learned to touch glass screens instead of each other,

to fast-forward faster than memory’s breath,

until nostalgia became an app and silence, a luxury.

Yet still, they return in dreams—

those graduates, now silvering at the temples,

bearing children who speak in abbreviations

and scroll instead of gaze. They sit at traffic lights

remembering what it meant to circle a date in pen, not pixels.

The years melt away like vinyl in fire,

resilient and distorted. What came in their place?—

A horizon made of streaming light,

a thousand windows open at once,

and still, no clear view.

So they walk— older, yes, but not finished.

Still dancing in the strobe of memory’s gymnasium,

still holding hands with ghosts who laugh in bell-bottoms,

still hearing “Welcome to the Future”

and whispering back,

We built this too.