It was the summer before college, and as a graduation present, I was on my way to Caracas to visit a friend, via Miami. But first, my wallet and passport got stolen—an anxiety nightmare that lingers to this day—waylaying me in Miami and acquainting me intimately with the Passport Agency, a serious adulting test. I was eighteen by just a few days.

Finally I arrived in Caracas, and we drove to my friend’s apartment via hillsides full of ranchitos. Suffice it to say, the contrast was stark and unforgettable. Focusing my tired energy inside the car, a new album was playing: Carly Simon’s Coming Around Again.

We listened to it copiously that week, savoring each song, and I remember feeling like Carly knew something about living, about love and loss and pain and truth and discovery.

I wanted to know it, too.

Over the course of college, I returned to this album and her voice many times. I fell in love and when it ended I took balm from her words “you have to hurt to understand.” I was getting there, or so I thought.

Decades passed in which I really learned about those things, directly and painfully. Marriage, divorce, loss of both parents and a premature child, struggles raising a child on my own.

Carly was long forgotten.

Then a few months ago, I heard “Let the River Run” out of the blue. Memory swelled and crashed like waves before me. Stunned with its vividness, I wrote a poem almost immediately and shared it within minutes of writing:

Let the River Run
Plays on the radio 
And I remember
When it came out
My first broken heart
The empty theatre
In the middle of the day
And my tears
(so strong that my parents
couldn’t understand
what I was saying)

Today as it plays
I feel this powerful wish
To talk to me then
And say:
Kid, you will find happiness 
More than once
You will love deeply
Fall and get up again
You will raise a child
To adulthood 
(past the age you are now)
You will even do
This amazing thing
Marry for a lifetime
And be given gifts
You never imagined
Including 
A second lifetime
After that
To rediscover 
Yourself, the girl
Sitting in that theatre
Crying over her broken heart

You will live
Within thirty minutes
Of that theatre 
It will be spring again
(just like it was then,
in fact it was
about now)
You will be happy
Really happy
At times
The happiest
You have ever been
You will be
Proud of yourself 
And you will have
A fair dose
Of wisdom
You earned 
And a large dose 
Of contentment 
You will cherish

In other words
Dry your tears, kid
All will be well
Let the river run

Love, me
At 53

You see, when I wrote this, I was in love again, a love that reminded me more of the joys of that fated college romance than anything I had experienced since.

Like my college love, my lover and I knew we were not destined to be together forever, yet we seized all the moments we had. Mid-life romance turns out to be quite magical. We joked that we were like lovers in which our spouses were Real Life. We were cheating on Real Life with our pockets full of fun and play and delight in one another. It was long distance, weekends only most of the time, and I can simply say this in summation: I was indeed genuinely happy.

Each Friday night, we would put everything from the week away, rarely to pick it up again until Monday. Many weekends we shared the three nights. Sometimes we traveled—we traveled well together—but most of the time we just rested in each other’s company. It’s wild to think how little we looked at our phones, except to keep abreast of news or to look up things of interest. Often I would forget where my phone was. We never watched a movie. Sometimes if we were exhausted, we would watch stand-up comedy and laugh. We laughed so much. It was such a relief from Real Life, from Covid and aloneness and longing and the mad race of accomplishment.

We were supposed to be cheating on Real Life for a short time, but one month stretched little by little to fifteen. My Real Life was heavy, and my lover helped me lift quite literally. He helped me move house, and he listened to my plight during our weekday evening calls. I tried to help him with his Real Life, too.

We fell deep into each other’s hearts as we kept pushing the deadline, the exit, re-entry, the cones. We joked about the cones, those bright orange traffic cones in high-performance driving class where you are supposed to brake from full speed to a full stop. I could never do it as a driver.

Let’s go to the cones, we would say. And we did. I am amazed at us.

We stayed strong and as in love as ever until our last day when we drove away. He to the south, me to the north in a rainstorm so intense neither of us could think about anything except getting home safely.

It took about five days for the tears to fall in earnest because I was used to my independence during the week, and we spoke here and there, in fact, more than we planned.

For the past fifteen months, this was what we knew. It’s a strange adjustment to miss the person with whom I have shared almost every weekend since last April. Monday feels better, partly because it’s Monday. Tuesday feels fine, too.

I know I need to learn new patterns, somehow, which will take time and patience. I need to adjust and let go completely.

But first, Carly.

I listen to her now, and she calms me. After hearing “Let the River Run” in the spring, I put Coming Around Again on my playlist. “Do the Walls Come Down”—the song that lingers in my ear today—is not one that spoke to me when I was young. “Do the walls come down / When you think of me / Do your eyes grow dim… Nothing like a rainy night / to set your heart remembering. Nothing like a vivid dream / to take you back again.” And later in the same song: “Something in my pocket / that was written years ago / in faded ink said / you are my fire / do you think so?”

In one of my early notes, I wrote, “thank you for giving me back my fire.”

Funnily enough, my lover is someone who can quote verse and lyrics to perfection. My memory and ear are nowhere near as keen, to such an extent that I have stories based on invented lyrics that I carry with me. To wit, in this song Carly sings: “do you hide me in your attic trunk like a stowaway?” My version was “do you hide me in your teardrop like a stowaway?” Writing this, I learn the proper words and find myself disappointed. I rather like the idea of stowing away my lover in a teardrop. It feels apt.

And so it goes.

I share this here, under the heading of Where I End and She Begins because this is one of my many “endings,” but an important one. An experience of significant duration that belonged just to me, yet it impacted me as a parent, too.

Clearing these weekends in a desperate, overdue attempt to put on an oxygen mask when I could scarcely breathe, I said to my adult child: this is for me; my weekends now belong to him and me for as long as this run lasts.

For a multitude of reasons I am not good with boundaries and limits especially with my girl, but at this point, I was tapped out. I had gone too far and was feeling bitter. Both G and I knew it.

I put this love relationship in front of the line, and you know what? It was good for all of us. Having my spark rekindled, I began to see things differently. I became more true to myself. My effort now is to hold this self-possession and defend my self-belonging, to maintain and cultivate my inner embers. I have been shown how it feels. I taste the possibility. I don’t want to forget.

Starting our first weekend apart, we speak by phone. “Your fingerprints are all over my recovery of self,” I say to him.

“And yours on mine,” he answers. 

I hang up, turn on the car stereo and hear Carly singing. It’s the classic we all associate with Casablanca, “The fundamental things apply… / The world will always welcome lovers / As time goes by.” – Herman Hupfeld (1931)

Then, at last, it is “Coming Around Again” itself.

“I don’t mind if I fall apart. There’s more room in a broken heart.”

“I believe in love.”

“And it’s coming around again.”

Inshallah.