He wrote this lyric for her:

She’s come back to tell me she’s gone / As if I didn’t know that / As if I didn’t know my own bed / As if I didn’t notice the way she brushed her hair from her forehead

Did you just get chills? I just got chills. I love Paul Simon. I have every single word of Graceland memorized. Some of my favorite childhood memories include dancing around my neighbor’s living room to that album, rug pulled away from the hardwood floors and the mysterious toothless skull grinning benignly down from their bookshelf. In eighth grade, I copied out every single lyric to “Boy in the Bubble” onto a sheet of notebook paper for a homework assignment, pressing pause on my tapedeck over and over as I transcribed it. Presumably, the assignment included copying or there was some major middle school plagiarism going on. But I never really considered that he wrote those lyrics for someone, though obviously he must have. Knowing who it is and knowing her in some sense, at least what she chooses to share in her book, kind of gets to me.

Then she calls her lady bits the “lagoon of mystery” and I laugh so hard I startle the person walking past my window on his way to the bars. And the moment passes.