I was entranced by the song from my first listen as a teenager. But it was a decade before I finally, truly understood it.

At 26, I found myself reliving a breakup that had happened more than two years prior: against the advice of friends, family, and therapists, my ex-boyfriend and I stayed in touch for more than a year after our relationship ended, until a big fight finally made us call it for good. (Of course, I couldn’t be too hard on myself about this; it took Nicks 40 years to go no-contact with Buckingham—and even that didn’t last.) For a while, I felt like I was over it. But then some light Instagram stalking led me to his new girlfriend.

After Nicks and Buckingham broke up in 1976, he quickly moved on, even bringing his new girlfriend along on tour. (And this, mind you, is not close to the most insane thing that happened in Fleetwood Mac.) Luckily for me, living in a different city meant that my chances of encountering either my ex or the girlfriend were low—but social media, working as it does, still managed to make the relationship feel inescapable.

I shouldn’t know what a girl I’ve never met—and probably never will—looks like, and I certainly shouldn’t be able to consult her educational and professional history to form theories about her personality. But I did, and that’s how I found myself clinging to every lyric of “Silver Springs” in a way I never had before.

Like Nicks, I had questions that I didn’t actually want the answers to: Don’t say that she’s pretty / And did you say that she loved you? / Baby, I don’t wanna know.

Uselessly, I yearned for confirmation that he’d never find someone like me again: Time cast a spell on you, but you won’t forget me.

And, selfishly, I wanted him to keep on being reminded of me, even after he took up with someone new: I’ll follow you down ’til the sound of my voice will haunt you.

More than I could as a teenager, I now understood that “Silver Springs” was about wanting to know that you meant something to someone, even if your time together was over. It was about hoping that the time you did have together didn’t go to waste.