Our Song Wasn’t a Bob Dylan Song, but My Song’s a Bob Dylan Song.

I’ve got Bob Dylan magic and no other kind of magic in me, whatever Danny says. He can’t take Bob Dylan. Not now.

Danny’s a punk and he’s still just a kid, but he was always calling everybody “kid.” I wished in the math class we were failing together that he’d grow up and sit so our arms were touching, so he could stop trying so hard to act miserable.

There was a lot of acting cocky, too. “Don’t my gal look fine,” he’d say, lewd smirk and his great blue eyeballs sucked into the knee-tear of my tights. Never wearing these things again. I thought Danny disgusted me then. It’s just like Bob says: “need a dump truck, baby, to unload my head.”

I used to drive Danny home from our high school, the Midwestern dirty heat’s dry dark leaves orbiting us like a crown. Rolling down the street slow as we please to his house. “Queen Jane,” he’d say as he got out and closed the passenger door, tipping the tip of his trucker hat, ginkgo leaves in the yard all fluttering behind his head, our own take on the Nashville Skyline cover.

Danny, what a sucker. Stoned half the time. God, it gave me the blues.

In my brother’s Buick 6, we’d listen to things that were definitely not Bob Dylan. We listened to Jay-Z because, like every seventeen-year-old hell-bent on falling in love, we snuffed up false bravado like Hoyt Axton cocaine.

Once, the line of cars out of the little grassy parking lot was so long and Danny was yammering something so hair-brained that I rear-ended hell outta the car in front of us. Too sucked into Danny’s horrible eyes, and I mean horrible. Danny got spooked and left before the cops came, but not before gallantly handing me his last piece of gum.

It was hard then to do something nice. I’m still not sure what sincerity is worth, but if I had to guess, back then, man, I woulda said nothing. Bob Dylan was la grande exception — but then, how sincere is Bob Dylan? How sincere is his myth? Bob Dylan is an asshole. Bob Dylan, are you dead yet?

The hair-brained thing that Danny had said in the car was this thing: “I got a bird that whistles, I got a bird that sings.” Danny and I had never been able, for the deaths of us, to arrive at the point.

He hated when I called him “Danny.” He would say, “My name is Dan,” like he was the goddamned President of the United States, or Bob Dylan.

“Who do you think you are?” I’d tell him. “The President of the United States? Bob Dylan?” But he was too distracted just then, driving my brother’s Buick 6, trying to remember the route to the place out past the highway where you can sit from above and watch the trains running through the valley like water.

He found it and he got out and laid his jacket out over the poisoned ivy. He told me the low sun was ripening my skin like a peach. I did not smile. He did not smile. I did not smile. He did not kiss me like a singing bird. I did not kiss back.

We never talked about me leaving, but we never talked about anything, really. She don’t make me nervous, she don’t talk too much. But me leaving was always out there, a distant season full of weather no one could predict.

I gave old Danny a call the day I moved away. 1600 miles away, that day. “Little Queen Jane, if it ain’t,” he answered, like he wasn’t expecting me to call him for a million years. “Sure,” I said. “Checkin’ in on you, kid.” I seen pretty people disappear like smoke.

He smiled over the phone but I could feel his face half-faking it. He had a lotta nerve after that to keep saying he was my friend.

Here in this new home where Danny’s never been, there is no place to watch the world from up high, or I haven’t found it yet, but there’s a big fat river here whose fog turns my hair thick and soft. It feels fitting my hair should be softer now I’m a woman of sorts.

I love to take long slow fluid runs by the river by myself, Bob Dylan playing in my head. I run when the day’s almost the night. “Heyyy, Mr. Tambourine Man,” I’m always saying to the moon as it shakes up and down in the boxes of my eyes.

Danny and I didn’t have a song, or any love to attach one to. If we did, he didn’t tell me which it was. “I Want You.” “She’s No Good.” “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” Whatever, we didn’t deserve one. Bob Dylan is too close to God.

Bob Dylan has died and has risen, and Bob Dylan is coming again, no matter what Bob Dylan says.

On my way back home from running, when I’m emptying the cold night and the moonlight from my lungs, I don’t think of Danny. I don’t think of Danny, I don’t think, I don’t think of Danny.

I hear you, Bob Dylan, ringing in my head for only me, this time, and you would always say it meant nothing but now I am unafraid of it meaning something, not just something, something true, and I want to say thank you but you’re just a myth, Bob Dylan, and I miss you so much without knowing you, and I’m suddenly nostalgic for memories I don’t have, and you are following me around like a thin extra shadow, mantra that I don’t always choose to repeat, but repeat, and repeat, and repeat:

She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back

She can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black

She don’t look back

She don’t —