An earworm has been haunting my eardrums for the past two days. It often happens that I start the day with a melody extracted from my subconscious, music that I don't know when, for some obscure reason, anchored itself in my memory and that resurfaces several years later without me being able to identify the cause of its resurgence.
That morning, I immediately hummed the tune, and emotion brought tears to my eyes, which transfixed me. Since the song wouldn't leave me, I searched for it on YouTube this morning to hear it.
I listened to it several times, first in its original form, then in a version in which an aged Marjo performed it with just as much simplicity.
If ever life should take you from me...
It's one of those bittersweet songs that takes flight in the soil of tenderness, smoothed by the pain we've all experienced. It expresses the resilience of love without obscuring the wounds of the past.
I'm not sure why this tune suddenly insists on my heart. I think it's because I've loved a lot and still do. However, I don't accept the promise it makes, that we must die in the face of betrayal or fate.
I've never wanted to die because someone was moving away from me. Maybe what I think are pure feelings are just selfish satisfactions... and I can do without them, even though I'm an adult.
So why cry? Why this sudden fragility?
I proudly hypothesize that my heart is full of intense, chivalrous fire. Is my passion my nobility? As always, I can't identify myself, and I can't tame myself.
I think I'll always be a naive, clumsy child who cries when his hopes are, once again, dashed.
All the same, I will have succeeded in cultivating beautiful gardens, it seems to me. Happiness is a sad herbal tea to be savored slowly, like a rejuvenating poison.
If one day
Life would take you from me
Who would console my sorrows
Where would I find joy
If one day
You were to leave me
Who would guide my steps?
I who love only you
If one day
Other hands would cuddle you
I'd bend my back
I would die, I swear it
If one day
In a great whirlwind
You erase my name
I'd die, I swear it
I swear I would
If one day
Life would take you from me
Who would guide my steps?
I who love only you
Only you