Silly Love Songs

February 18, 2011 at 4:49 pm (Pure Love)
Tags: first love, Gladys Knight and the Pips, holding onto love, keeping love alive, letting go of love, memoir, Neither One of Us Wants to be the first to say, old love as memoirist, past and present, silly love songs, When you are old and grey, Yeats

Caravaggio, vispix.com

Kelly Salasin, 2011

Silly to think, that after ALL the sentiment your young heart poured out in love letters and flowers and proclamations of undying love, that it is unflinching I, who ended up being the truly romantic one.

That 25 years later, when a song stumbles forth from my shuffle of 2,000, it still stirs my heart with the aching loss of love…

It’s sad to think

We’re not gonna make it

And it’s gotten to the point

Where we just can’t fake it

For some ungodly reason

We just won’t let it die

I guess neither one of us

wants to be the first to say good-bye

detail Caravaggio, visipix

And funny to think, that everyone around us–all those friends and loved ones who endured our ups and exponentially growing downs–could see the ending that we refused to find.

And even odder, that it was YOU–who once held on sooooo tightly–who was the one who finally let go, without so much as a goodbye… when I had been the one who was always leaving…

I keep wondering

Wondering

What I’m gonna do without you

And I guess you must be wondering the same thing too

So we go on

Go on together

Living a lie

Everytime I find the nerve

Everytime I find the nerve to say I’m leaving

Those old memories get in my way

Lord knows it’s only me

That I’m deceiving

That all these years later, this last verse still racks my body with the truth of how fragile that gift of love came to be…

There can be no way

There can be no way

This can have a happy ending

So we just go on

Hurting and pretending

Convincing ourselves to give it just one more try…

In the end (our ending), this powerful, independent woman, discovered how to be a “girl”–weepy and dramatic.  And you, a sullen and overly sentimental boy, discovered how to be a man–powerful and clear headed.  Although it didn’t feel like it at the time, I got the better of the end–of our ending.

Farewell my love

Goodbye

We are each middle-aged now, and neither of us knew that I would be the one who refused to say Goodbye.

“Leave me in the past,” you plead, not wanting to be paraded in my mind–let alone in my work as a writer.

Bosch, visipix.com

But what I’m coming to understand, is that it’s not really you that I want to hold onto, but the love (albeit a little dramatically)–the love which comes from the same place from which I pour heart into my life, and into my writing, and into my sons, and into the man who’s shared my bed since you made this room for him inside.

So that 25 years later, I am still moved by a song or a memory or a poem that I once shared with you~

 

 

 

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

~ W.B. Yeats

(song lyrics by Jim Weatherly, as recorded by Gladys Knight and the Pips.)