Late, On Time…? [Muse Part II]

I had been living with the song and its images for years, long enough that they had become part of the background hum of my thinking. They never demanded attention. They simply stayed. It was only recently that they sharpened, prompted by two questions that arrived gently and without ceremony, asked by the same person who has a way of doing that.

What was it like to help settle a child in college?

What was it like to solemnize my child’s marriage?

Ordinary questions, really, the kind people ask without realizing they are asking about time more than events. A muse, in the truest sense. Not an object of inspiration, but a presence that tilts you slightly off balance, just enough to make you look again at a room you thought you had already left.

I tried to answer well. I sent voice notes that wandered, doubled back, repeated themselves. I could hear myself circling, offering coherence without quite arriving at precision. I spoke about logistics, transitions, perspective, the mechanics of moving through milestones. I realized I was thinking my way around something rather than into it, not because I was avoiding feeling, but because the feeling itself refused to arrive as a single emotion. It was layered, simultaneous, resistant to clean naming.

Over time, I have learned to reach for proxies when that happens. Music. Story. Narrative. Ways of holding experience without flattening it. Somewhere in that circling, it landed on me that our lives are shaped less by grand failures than by the quieter moments where we hesitate, pause, or simply fail to step forward without realizing what that pause might cost.

That was when I found myself returning again, almost reflexively, to The Ballad of Cleopatra by The Lumineers. A woman seen across time. Young, grieving her father, proposed to at the funeral, unable to answer. That hesitation, brief and human, becomes the hinge on which everything else turns. The man she loves leaves, not dramatically and not cruelly, but because timing has its own logic. What follows is not a collapse, but a life unfolding as sequence. She marries. She has a son, whom she later names as the happiest part of her life. She divorces. She becomes a taxi driver, moving constantly through the city, carrying other people’s stories in her back seat while her own remains quietly unresolved.

What gives the story its weight is how plainly she speaks about it. There is no appeal for sympathy, no revisionism.

When I die alone, I will be on time.

The line lingers because it feels accurate rather than despairing. Forever late to her own life, perhaps, yet finally punctual to it. There are no villains here, only consequences accumulating over time, the way they do in real lives. The imagined path is not romanticized. The chosen path is not redeemed. Both are allowed to exist without hierarchy.

It matters that this is a woman’s story, not in a symbolic or political sense, but because it carries a particular orientation toward time and endurance, toward holding contradiction without forcing it into resolution. A form of the feminine that has little to do with gender and everything to do with receptivity, containment, and relational awareness.

Watching it again, I understood why this story had stepped forward when I was asked those questions. It held what I could not yet say cleanly. It allowed joy and sadness to coexist without demanding that one cancel the other. I do not feel sad. I do feel happy. 

And I feel something else that arrives unexpectedly, a tenderness that overwhelms at times without announcing itself as grief or pride. 

My children are older now, moving along paths that are increasingly their own, even when I cannot see where those paths bend. At some point, I notice that I am no longer walking beside. 

I am a few steps behind, not because I have fallen back, but because they have found their own pace. I can still see them. That seems to be enough.

The questions I was asked remain unanswered in the way people often expect answers, but they are no longer unheld. I see now why I needed to arrive at them sideways, carried by a story spacious enough to tolerate ambiguity.

Perhaps being late to simple answers is the only way to be on time to something truer.

The song keeps playing. 

The road continues. 

I remain in motion, attentive, letting the distance be what it is.

from Rambling of an Itinerant

Additional Reading

• When the Muse Doesn't Know 

Acknowledgment: Co-created with a Muse, my kids, and a touch of GenAI.