Other assorted love songs

[darkluna]

found amongst old files, and still too, too true

The "'Layla' issues" entry. The "I worship at the altar of unrequited love" entry. The reason why I cry, sometimes, at the meld of piano and sweet softly keening guitar at the end of the song. The reason why I think, sometimes, that I'm too broken to love someone real, love him for real, and for good.

"Do you ever get to know if there's someone you're meant to be with?" D said during a smoke break one day. "And do you know when you've found him?"

"Oh," I said. "I feel like I've been circling that question all my life."

My path around it, like a spiral, narrowing as I close in on the answer, but narrowing to infinity; I'll never know for sure.

Widen the focus. Why "'Layla' issues"?

Because, OK, it's like this, isn't it? At my age, at my remove from what really happened, it has always seemed mythical. Boy loves girl he can't have, and it pours out into this song, this alchemy of pain and longing and love. And it wins her.

If the story stopped there, it wouldn't make me cry.

But there's a postscript to the "happily ever after," and we know it didn't last.

And I, who have loved music all my life and have found my most shining happiness and deepest sorrow both expressed there, want real life to live up to that beauty.

I want the love the song stands for to have been real.

But I have to believe it wasn't.

Because if love can be real and end anyway, how is it worth believing in?

If the people who are meant to be together aren't, why seek and hope for the one person who is for you? You could find them and lose them. You could find them and never recognize them.

I want to believe that the world works the way it should. I want life to be fair, or at least have its reasons in the end. Maybe it does. But maybe it doesn't.

Comments

[ezrael.livejournal.com]

I want the love the song stands for to have been real.

But I have to believe it wasn't.

Because if love can be real and end anyway, how is it worth believing in?

I had to respond to this, because it touches upon something I've long believed: the duration of something is in no way all-important to its value. Life itself is worth believing in, and it doesn't stay: the springtime of our lives fades, we grow old (if we are fortunate) and we die. Yet life is still glorious and valuable and precious and we take part in it. So too with love.

I love everyone I have ever loved. Even the relationships that disintegrated, with acrimony and bitterness between us... that didn't kill those moments where we walked in the snow, or explored each other under a shady tree in view of Naragansett Bay, or sat on the floor of the apartment and watched the rain fall and listen to the radiator pop and hiss and were content. Those moments were real, that love was real: the transcience of the experience only confirmed how precious and gorgeous it all was.

Granted, I'd love to be able to do away with that searing, shrivelling agony when it is cut away, for whatever reasons... but grief is how we cope with that constant erosion we have to go through in life, and it serves as much to polish those precious stones we collect as anything else.

As for being meant to be together... I've never really believed in that, or more accurately, I believe you can be meant to be with someone without it being meant to be forever. But like I said, I love everyone I ever loved: even the ones who left me, or who I left, I still love. Like a tapestry, I'm everywhere penetrated by the threads they left in me, the colors and images of those memories embroidered in my being, in who I became and who I'm becoming. They're all here, and while it would be a true paradise if I could have them all at once and love them all and have them love me and each other and have it last forever, what I have is pretty sweet and probably more than I deserved.

[darkluna.livejournal.com]

*blinks*

*looks at light bulb over head*

Wow. You're right, and wow.

"Meant to be" doesn't mean "meant to be forever."

I think one big thing I'm meant to learn this time around is that you don't just arrive. You don't look around one day and have a perfect life that you can sit in and be static and happy. You have to keep moving and changing. You don't find love and write The End. You don't accomplish a goal and be done. There is always more to learn and do. The road runs on behind and before you, as long as your life. And for someone like me, who wants to get there and know it, that can be hard to accept. But it's also comforting in a way, because the road can always take me somewhere new, and the past is always a part of my journey that cannot be taken away.

Thanks. :-)

[mendoza.livejournal.com]

Wow. Thank you for writing that. It's something I needed to read.