The first time I heard it, my heart hit the floor. The first time I listened to that lyric, I was wasted. Wiped out, done in, weak from the utter exhaustion of waiting so long. Biding my time, not - for the whomever he "might be," but for someone to creatively express the necessity of such a lingering.
Don't get me wrong, "Slowly counting down the days - Till I finally know your name" and "The way your hand feels round my waist - The way you laugh, the way your kisses taste" both reached for a part of me that had yet to find words. But it was that last bit that really laid me out.
As often as marriage proposals have come along, it has always been Love that remains elusive to me. In fact, from the first time I dipped my toes in the water, a ten year to-and-fro that fiercely corroborates Joy Williams' speculation that "everybody has at least one person in their life that they wish they had never come across," to a more recent "Oh I wish you were the one - Wish you were the one that got away" on repeat.
And the proposals, OH the proposals: both seeking possession, a fate worse than death to someone, like me, who wants to be let alone as often as I'm made familiar with "I can't pull you closer than this. It's just you and the moon on my skin." One in the market for some sort of broodmare, the other was eager to ease a triflin' fueled insecurity. But there was never Love.
I was flattered when I interviewed Matt Chambers and he imagined that someone had Loved me in such a way that I might have taken a different path. But, on the flip side, it is to my inescapable frustration that I still get unsolicited "you know it's not too late for you"s. I didn't say it was. I don't think it is. And I, write this one down, certainly don't need you to tell me. I know what it's like to sit on an airplane, bound for a port you call home and a person you don't Love. And I will pass on a second helping of that.
But these two get it. The Civil Wars make the kind of music that I hear when I get very still and quiet, the kind of music that plays in my heart. And it listens, like a memory.
They serenade of being "lonely too long" in a way that makes exquisite sense of the patience it takes to find the "same old, same old." Someone, Joy was told, to think of "as if you were backpacking a continent: that I could spend my entire life with bare feet and a backpack, [walking] through Africa, and on my dying day still not know everything there is about that continent."
For this, I will linger as long as it takes. Because it's only too late, if you fail to wait.
For a next album from the kindred pair, I may linger longer even than that. They're not speaking to each other, that's what all the fuss is about anyway. And I get that. It breaks my heart too. The Civil Wars are engaged in an, albeit civil... war of their own. Am I crushed that I may never again get a chance to see them perform live? Yes. But I've dealt with that before over Alison Krauss & Robert Plant. And I would rather focus on this album, by all reports a lagniappe that might - but for the grace - never have seen the light of day.
My favorite? Sacré-Cœur of course.
So Here's To Joy & John Paul. Here's To Patience.
oh . . .
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