That's a Dylan lyric. It's from a song he wrote for a movie and it's the most liberating shit I've ever heard.
I mean - yes, it's true that we all get the choice to lay some of our burdens on down. That isn't especially unique. But that isn't what he is saying. He isn't saying he is the one who has changed. He isn't saying that he has let go of caring about you and now he feels lighter and freer and changed.
He sings "things" have changed. Stuff outside of him. Like a new bank account; or a broken-down bike; or a better option; or stronger boundaries; or a global fucking pandemic; or a filled up notebook; or a different diet; or maybe even the weather or something like that.
Other shit has changed. And those changes - those that happen around us and to us - are enough to make you no longer care. He is saying that you all gotta do is hang around long enough and things will change and your caring will go away.
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Jamie was from Georgia - the state, not the country. We met in New York. She lived in Long Island City and would tell people she was from D.C. One night, after two plates of bone marrow and a bottle of burgundy at Blue Ribbon - followed by a load of key-bumps in the restroom for dessert - she told me her real story. When she was 16, her parents went through a messy divorce. Her grandmother lived in D.C. and they sent Jamie up there to live with her for a few months to avoid the worst of a whole festival of petty recriminations.
Eventually, her dad settled things by moving out to Europe for a new job and she returned to Georgia.
It's a strange thing, the way how folks who grow up in The South, try so hard to hide that when they get up to the North East. I wonder if her dad would also lie about being from Georgia all the way over in Brussels.
Later on - when we both ended up in Los Angeles for the same reasons, but with different people - I noticed that her accent had returned. She now had a Georgia Drawl on the end of every sentence. It was clear and strong as we climbed Runyon and she spoke of throwing her letters in the sand.
In NYC her Southern Past was a burden, but in LA it was a bridge. Not sure if that says more about her or more about the way people in those cities view youth and history. Probably both.
It wasn't just her accent that California changed. The girl she had moved out there to move in with, ended up moving on herself a few short months later. Jamie found out by text. A Thursday afternoon buzz on her phone came through just as she was walking into work to start her shift. Her girlfriend had - unbeknownst to Jamie, - applied for and gotten a new job out in Austin and had a week to pack-up and relocate.
As Jamie was struggling to digest this news, the second message came through:
"But you can still stay here. My landlord says he'll be happy to switch the lease over to your name."
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I think about that morning hike with Jamie, often. The one where she told me about those texts and the feeling of falling back into her own chest. How she quit her job right then and there and drove to the beach to watch the water crash up onto the rocks on the Zuma shoreline - hoping the sounds of the waves would drown out the shouting in her head.
When that failed to work, she called her grandmother. Sitting in her car in the beach parking lot, she sobbed down the line as she picked at the skin on the back of her left hand. Her grandmother then booked Jamie a motel room in Malibu and she holed up there for a week till the girlfriend - or, the now ex-girlfriend - left for Austin. And then Jamie came back to Hollywood.
She took over the lease on the apartment, cleaned out all the evidence of a shared life lived there, found a new job and started over again. Alone.
She drank a little more. Exercised a lot more. And spent too much time on her phone.
And she no longer tried to hide her southern accent or how she missed her hometown or how she felt about her father's shitty abandonment. She didn't care about what you thought about all of that. Because things had changed.
