"When you’re flying high/ Take my heart along/ I’ll be the harmony/ To every lonely song that you learn to play."

The beauty and the mess.

There’s this universal vision of great passion and oh so tender love, cried out in vivid ache or whispered soft. Magnified by a lifetime consuming hungrily all the art that mirrors back this desire, we’re left with a promise - almost tangible - of the moving and vivid emotions we hope so fiercely really do exist. And so we fill our own words and images with half-frames and soft syllables of this as-yet-unknown apparition, characters faking the words we don’t yet understand the meaning to, all the while gripped with a numb fear that, just as we add to this illusion with our own hopeful pretence, so too has everyone else. All we’re doing is propping up this myth with our own longing. A perpetual cycle of yearning for a dream which may not exist the way they told us it would.

The softly loving voice, the ease of gentle lyricism; is it any wonder a girl comes of age with such naively hopeful notions of menfolk and their ways? I don’t know this love. Lust? I know fleeting shadows of desire for sure, mechanical and distant as my mind wanders and hopes for something more than this. I know of affection, and platonic warmth. I know of care and naïve thrills. And I know what it is to have my heart break from loneliness, (a pain that bypasses that organ altogether in favour of the gripping anguish that consumes your chest and centre), even without it ever having swollen.

But I know not love, the way they promise it here with fragile banjo and soaring melody. I don’t believe those pledges anymore, of course. Tragic plays and windswept novels are no more than a frail and pained figure hunched behind that vast curtain; but it’s that broken and imperfect thing I desire.

Because there has to be some feeling more than these I know already.