I once had a boyfriend who took advantage of music. He made music do his dirty work for him.

N. and I grew up together - you know this story. We met at sixteen, all raging hormones, thinking we were smart. We went to summer camp together and snuck around abandoned mildewed cabins in the dark, attended each other’s proms, went to the same college, and we (I) insisted on displaying photographs of our young love on the mantel in my parents’ home on Long Island. All this by the age of twenty-one.

We were that couple that had no choice but to break up or get married young. It would have been me in a long white veil and Converse sneakers, standing somewhere on the beach next to him. He would have his nails bitten down to the quick and a Camel Light dangling from his lips. We were doomed from early on, we just didn’t know it. Scratch that. I didn’t know it.

We went to college together in Madison, Wisconsin. (A small but not entirely unrelated digression: Music sounds better in Madison, especially in the fall. The air all across the country feels cleaner and cooler in autumn, but in Madison the autumn air also brings some of the clearest streams of sunlight you can find in America, and heartbreakingly crisp afternoons. Perfect to match any mood, any tune, any altered state of consciousness.) N. and I were like brother and sister, except we liked each other’s bodies a whole lot more than is generally accepted of siblings in western culture. There were burps and farts and long spans of time spent in the bathroom, magazine or newspaper in tow. Hell, we were immature. We were also witness to each other’s most unseemly moments, drunken bouts and nasty colds. Silly jokes left us cackling for hours on hung-over Saturday mornings pressed tight into a single dorm room bed.

But then one day, in the September of our senior year, N.’s unseemliness extended well beyond the realm of the scatological and veered into downright inappropriate. I went to Ann Arbor to visit a friend, and he decided this would be as good a time as any to sleep with his ex. I returned, found out, freaked out, and N. began sending me handwritten love letters that he wrote while locked in a study carrel on the eight floor of Madison’s formidable Memorial Library. I was supposed to believe that he was really “losing it” without me, thanks to pages of loose-leaf that arrived blotted and tear-stained. These letters were left on the matted carpet steps outside my bedroom in the duplex apartment on East Gilman Street. The letters told me how good I was, but how he would understand if I never took him back. The letters pointed to some of our most tender moments, and N. excoriated himself on a number of counts. Admittedly, he gave good love letter.

Anyway, the point: later that fall, twenty-four hours before I had a major paper due, N. dropped off a letter, telling me it would be the last one. He stood in the doorway of my bedroom, slumped and haggard. I took the letter and propped it on the desk, right next to the computer. I didn’t let myself read it until the paper was finished.

For his final letter, N. had decided that his words would no longer suffice. Instead, he turned to a real master of words. On page three, he asked me if I remembered the Bob Dylan song “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Of course I did. He had put it on a mix tape made for me years earlier. N. wrote that there were a few lines in that song that spoke of our relationship in better terms than he could muster, and he quoted them on the crinkly paper. I’m a-thinkin’ and a-wond’rin’, walkin down the road / I once loved a woman, a child I’m told, I give her my heart but she wanted my soul / But don’t think twice, it’s all right.

Wait. So he’s leaving me? I want his soul? He can only give me his heart? And what about the rest of that sad-as-dead-babies song? It ain’t no use in calling out his name like I never done before? What? I didn’t understand. What was he saying? And why couldn’t he just say it? We never did too much talkin’ anyway? That’s not true! All we did was talk! You just kinda wasted my precious time?! He must be kidding.

So N. had not only abused Dylan, he had misused Dylan. Here he was trying to win me back with a song about breaking up. I was confused, and what’s worse, a great Dylan song had just been irrevocably ruined for me, lopped right off the list of songs I could listen to without choking lumps forming in my throat. Full disclosure: somehow we got back together. But N. was weak. He was so weak that many dirty infidelities followed. And naturally, thankfully, by the sheer grace of someone who believes in pure love, we didn’t last. I mean, it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why babe, if you don’t know by now - once a cheater, always a cheater. N. just refused to get off the dark side of the road.

So let me tell you: don’t be fooled. If “Don’t Think Twice” shows up on a mix tape your honey gives you, well, you should think twice. He’s trying to tell you something, even if he’s not sure what it is.