love song

It's Valentine's Day so of course I'm paintng my nails red and listening to songs like this one, and oh, this one too because it's me and I still cling hard to the idea of love and old time romance despite any recent fascination I may have developed for dirty boys. But with that being said, the more I listen to Devendra and Daniel sing these songs about love, the more I realize these love songs I always seem to come back to time and time again are less about being in love and more about the idea of, or the yearning for, or the loss of love itself. Devendra tells me to put him in my blue skies, put him in my grey as he sings a song to bring me home, and one night in the summer, I listened to Daniel reassure me that true love will find me in the end for an hour on repeat and I cried the entire time.

And so maybe my definition of a perfect love song isn't one about the actual act of being in love but rather about the yearning and the missing and the hope of it all because isn't love, perfect love, about having someone to miss in the end? Love should consume like these songs and make me cry for hours on an end on an evening in July. This is not to say that I'm bitter and jaded about love. Oh no, I'm quite the opposite (my nails are painted red today, after all). These tears can be happy tears, and this missing carries with it the promise of return and reunion that sends shivers up spines and turns your head and heart all sorts of dizzy.