The Only Living Boy in New York

Wow, here’s another song that played a deep and important role in my music therapy internship. It represented a shared moment of profound intimacy between me and an end-stage HIV/AIDS patient. A relatively young man, not much older than me. This song had long been an expression of my own feelings of loneliness and isolation and yet hope for connection. A few weeks later, this patient passed away, the first death I experienced as a clinician-in-training. And, strangely, a few months later, I had a dream about a good friend of mine catching a plane at the airport, the sensation of two kindred souls just missing each other, bearing great similarities and sharing many experiences, but never getting the timing quite right to just get together and be in the moment. Upon waking I realized it was a direct reference by my subconscious to this song and the line “Tom, get your plane right on time.” Loneliness has been such a deep-running recurrent theme in my life, from my early childhood when my parents split up and I was then separated from my alcoholic single mother when she became deathly ill, then shuffled between relatives until she recovered. The theme of loneliness recurred during my difficult tween years when I was ostracized and bullied and at times didn’t have a single friend in my entire school. To my days as a hopeful, melancholy, diffident college kid with social anxiety and a basket full of trauma. To my early 30’s, recovering in the hospital after losing my leg and nearly my life, and realizing how profoundly unhappy I was in an emotionally abusive marriage I’d never been able to break out of. “Here I am” the song goes….and yes, “here I am” so much happier than I ever was, thanking my lucky stars to have found a kind, sensitive, loving and caring partner who sees me for who I truly am. But, somehow, the bittersweet taste of loneliness is always on the back of my tongue, and I can never quite shake the feeling that I myself am “the only living boy in New York.”