then, we would be okay
One of the songs that overwhelms my soul is “Homesick” by Sleeping At Last. The lyrics, paired with the melancholy vocals and the bright twang of a ukulele perfectly encapsulates a yearning for the innocence, joy, and simplicity of childhood. This song allows me to kneel on the earth of my heart and dig up the emotions I had buried for so long.
The song begins with the lyrics:
you spend your whole life
just to remember the sound
when the world was brighter
before we learned to dim it down
I often notice myself missing the times when I wasn’t so afraid, when I laughed more and cried less. Now, after disappointment and many failures, I have learned to dim down the world to keep myself safe, because the light was too much for the darkness inside me to handle.
call it survival
call it the freedom of wills
Sometimes, as children grow up, we teach them to stop dreaming, stop hoping. We call it the freedom of wills, when in reality they gave up because we were constantly telling them they should.
if love’s elastic then were we born to test its reach?
is it buried treasure
or just a single puzzle piece?
it’s poison ivy
beneath our brave and trusting feet
Much of our life is spent trying to understand love. Is it conditional or unconditional? Does it change or does it stay the same? As we grow, we search and search for love. Somehow we never seem to find X or the missing puzzle piece that would make everything clear. When we do find love, we find that it was a façade or that it doesn’t last or that it makes our heart break.We find that when we touch love, we always discover pain.
At the end of the song, he sings:
cry wolf, cry mercy
cry the name of the one you were raised to believe
cry hard, cry yourself to sleep
cry a storm of tears if it helps you breathe
if it helps you
if it helps you breathe
When our heart shatters, we cry out to anything that we think will save us. We learn to grasp onto anything that will keep us alive. Anything that will help us breathe, if only for a moment. We yearn for a connection, for hope, for love, for what we once had but is now gone, snatched away by the hands of the universe. And we are alone. If we could only go back to how things used to be, to how we used to be, then, we would be okay.