All unhappy lovers are unhappy in one similar way: they misunderstand what they are going through, they interpret it wrong, they miss the nuance of love and they don't listen hard enough.
Maybe we have something else in common: we are day dreamers, we are dreaming of things that only exist in the deepest recessess of our imagination… and I don't mean heart.
Me? I am a sequential love loser, at this point of my life I have finally gotten the message, it is, not unlike my dealings with alcohol, something that leaves me alone on my knees. And it is something I find difficult to find a music to quite distill my feelings. Perhaps there are moments when songs fit in but there are many more where I have to twist the songwrter like a pretzel to sink it into the wound.
I broke up with a girl I'd been seeing for a couple of years. Break ups are like a death, sometimes a cancer eats it out and sometimes a heart attack fells before you know what happens. A heart attack felled this one.
So I went looking for music and didn't find any. Nothing quite fit my mix of hurt and, worst, indifference. What I wasn't feeling was the normal heartbreak, I was cooler to it. But I felt a sort of loss of something else. All lovers are innocent and all divorces are an end to an innocence and the innocence is this: "I can't live without you" when not only can you but you are doing. Who is lying to whom? Why am I being told I need something when I can carry on fine without it. And in that moment even a middle aged man is growing up, losing the dream one more time. The dream of need. The innocence of love.
The Bruce Fornsby and Don Henley "The End Of The Innocence" is an overcooked ballad about a childhood poisoned by he singers parents divorce and linked to the political corruption of the Reagan era, the end of the 1960s communal teen generation innocence.
The song isn't great, though it is good, the two parts don't fit very well together and the song is lugubrious. Plus I don't much like Henley's vocal. But something about the chorus seems to reach into what I am feeling. I don't feel so innocent any more, like all ex-lovers I feel defeated and shallow.