When I was in my 20s, I lived in Boston. At one point, I had a job as a mental health worker at a private psychiatric hospital, despite the fact that I was an English major in college.

I worked the evening shift, along with a cluster of other 20-somethings. There was a young woman who dedicated her off-work hours to a cause called “Wages for Housework;” a guy who adhered to the teachings of an Eastern spiritual thinker; a recent Radcliffe College graduate — which is now Harvard University — who was a painter; a former Pennsylvania State University cheerleader; and someone who I thought of as a bohemian cowgirl. Sometimes after work, a group of us would go out and see where we took the night or, perhaps more accurately, where the night took us.

Carrie was the name of the bohemian cowgirl. She’d grown up in a town in Montana, graduated from the University of Montana, and hadn’t fit her piece of the puzzle into either place. She was long of limb and hair, and wore either a blue denim jacket or a tan suede jacket like the cowboys in the Marlboro cigarette commercials of that time. She lived with a young poet who was carving a niche in the Cambridge literary scene.

Carrie and I shared a laugh about a picture I had of myself in the Black Hills of South Dakota, on top of a trail horse so tame it wouldn’t have bucked if a hydrogen bomb detonated next to it. I’d managed to pose as if I knew what I was doing on top of a horse, with the operable word being “pose.” (As I’ve heard it said, “The only horses we had in my neighborhood growing up had police on top of them.”) I told Carrie I was “The Singing Cowboy” and she told me the real cowboys she knew back in Montana would make short work of me and any song I sang.

I left Boston, and wound up settling in my native Pioneer Valley, not in the lower valley where I grew up, but here in the upper valley, “behind the tofu curtain.”

One day about 15 years after my time in Boston, I was walking into a convenience store in Burlington, Vermont, and who do I see but Carrie. I recognized her despite the fact that her look had changed markedly. Her long hair was cut short and choppy and she wore a navy pea coat and combat boots. She told me she was living in Burlington. After talking with her awhile, I didn’t have the sense she’d fit her piece into the right puzzle yet.

We didn’t arrange to get together, nor did we exchange contact information.

That was the last time Carrie came into my life until recently. Her re-entry took place on one of those nights when I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep because my brain was churning out too many thoughts. One thought turned out to be that I do a “where are they now?” internet search for Carrie.

Very quickly, I found her obituary, published a few years ago in her Montana hometown.

As measured against the Carrie I knew, her obituary was verse of the simplistic, sunny side up, rhyming variety.

The obituary said she had surviving brothers and sisters who still lived in Montana — or perhaps, never left — and I imagined one or more of them had crafted it.

One aspect of the obituary I took as unsanitized, undecorated fact was the listing of her geographic comings and goings. After that time in Burlington, where she’d had a daughter, she returned to her hometown. I always wonder what it’s like for someone who leaves their hometown because they can’t squeeze themselves into it, takes a deep dive into worlds beyond its norms, and then comes back. Do they swim back to shallower waters and find peace, or, at least, placidity? Or is it a case of “How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ‘em Down On The Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?)”

Whatever did or did not transpire for her in Montana was not enough to keep Carrie there for the rest of her days. After a fair stretch, she left her roots again, went back to Vermont, and eventually made her way to New Mexico. The obit did not say how she’d died, but she was not yet 70. Alone in the darkness, I found myself hoping and, yes, saying a prayer that she fit into the puzzle of All Time.

So at 3 o’clock in the morning I was moved to write the first draft of this column. I’m not sure exactly why.

Perhaps it’s just as simple as sometimes at this stage of my life, those who peopled my journey come back to me, and the writer in me wants/needs to tell you about them.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.