Some songs strike at the very heart we try so hard to protect, hitting right through the one chink in the armor you worried about – the hole you were so right to worry about – and in some way you have to wonder if the heart didn’t want for it to happen, like it knew it wouldn’t be complete without breaking, as if that was the very purpose of a heart. Is a life complete without surviving a heartbreak? If not, I’ve no worries – my life is woefully whole in that respect, with several heartbreaks still somehow mending – and it’s always the unrequited heartbreaks that hurt the most – those moments of unexplored could-have-beens that never quite got off the ground, that perished before they gave each other a chance. There’s something sadder about the bud that never blooms.
Love will abide
Take things in stride
Sounds like good advice
But there’s no one at my side
And time washes clean
Love’s wounds unseen
That’s what someone told me
But I don’t know what it means
‘Cause I’ve done everything I know
To try and make you mine
And I think I’m gonna love you
For a long, long time
This song may very well provide the soundtrack to my entire past of torturous romantic escapades – that it has arrived all these years later to help make sense of those doomed moments touches me in a way that is as surprising as the tears that suddenly rolled down my cheeks in the dimming of this day.
Contrary to likely-popular belief – and it’s ok if you thought it too because it totally tracks – I’m not one for self-pity. No, my pride was too great for that – my tears before tonight were for all the boys who missed out on what I would have been to them. Yeah, that’s right, I got it like that – my pride was such that I mourned for them not seeing how good I could be – how good we could be together – and a bit was for selfishness too, because love makes us selfish and ruthless and cruel, thinking we’d miss out on something that would change the world.
Caught in my fears
Blinking back the tears
I can’t say you hurt me
When you never let me near
Maybe those boys were just wise to me, wise to my failings, wise to my pride – maybe they knew the day would come when I’d bore and tire of them, when I’d realize how much better I was than them – because you can say that when it’s true, when no one else has come along to thrill because you’re the most thrilling and interesting person in any room you’ve ever inhabited. Wise to this sort of insufferable hubris, to the ridiculous inability to fathom how someone could not want to be with me. Yeah, I got it like that…
And I never drew
One response from you
All the while you fell
All over girls you never knew
Oh how I used to cry for those boys – the ones I thought were worthy, the ones I obsessed over, the ones who seemed interesting and thrilling and beautiful in their own right – I cried over them and gave them all the power. There weren’t that many – less than I could count on two hands – and perhaps they were more special than everyone else. They each occupied a precious portion of my life, and I gave them that space willingly – because I knew even back then that it was my nature to love and love and love, no matter the return, no matter the cost, no matter the price and no matter the pain.
‘Cause I’ve done everything I know
To try and make you mine
And I think it’s going to hurt me
For a long, long time
Where was this song then? Perhaps it’s best that it wasn’t around, considering the way it’s already wrecking me at such a distant vantage point. How strange the way an arrow will arrive years and decades after the fact and somehow find its way to pierce the heart at its most vulnerable point. My tears are no longer for all those silly boys – they fall for one singular young man who could be the singer of this song. I see him all these years later as I watch from a place of safety and warmth and relative accomplishment, with hopefully a little more wisdom than I had when I glimpsed him from the mirrors and subway windows and glasshouse panes of my youth. Back then I was too close to him to see his worth, to see his love.
Wait for the day
You’ll go away
Knowing that you warned me
Of the price I’d have to pay
And life’s full of flaws
Who knows the cause?
Living in the memory
Of a love that never was
I weep for him now, more than he ever wept for himself, because of all that he didn’t know, and all that he didn’t realize he was giving up in service of another. I weep because I wouldn’t change anything for him, for the fact that going through it all made him into the person I am today. I’m sorry that it had to be that way, but not at all sorry for how it all turned out. If that required some heartbreak, if that needed some fool for a catalyst that impelled him to greater heights, then it was worth it. And it’s worth crying for too.
I’ve done everything I know
To try and change your mind
And I think that’s going to hurt me
For a long, long time
‘Cause I’ve done everything I know
To try and make you mine
And I think I’m gonna love you
For a long, long time
