As part of McSweeney’s long-running series “Open Letters to People or Entities Who Are Unlikely to Respond,” Summer Brennan wrote “An Open Letter to the Mix Tape Made for Me by My College Boyfriend, Now Deceased.”

It’s exactly as poignant and sadly funny as the title makes it sound, and in Brennan’s able hands, it becomes downright transcendent. A preview:

I should tell you, Mix Tape, that most of the time I don’t think I believe in love anymore. I think it’s just another blossoming and fading thing, nothing to get so worked up about. But your easy listening hits of the 1970s and 1980s will never die.