Good ear worm

Recently, I've been listening to the album Wish by The Cure. It's the only disc in my car right now. I know all the songs by heart and can sing along with them, but for some reason, "A Letter to Elise" struck me deeply this time. Maybe it's because of all the lyrical poetry and story lines I have running through my head as I mentally prepare myself for my upcoming writing classes. This song snagged my ears not because I'm living through heartache right now--far from it--but because of its sheer poetic quality. Robert Smith knows how to convey the heartbreak of love through his lyrics.

The part of the song that made me say "Oh!" in its magical portrayal of the futility of trying to hold on to feelings that just aren't there was this one:
"And every time I try to pick it up / Like falling sand / As fast as I pick it up / It runs away through my clutching hands..."

Simply beautiful. I see a man holding thousands of tiny glass hearts in his hands, and they slip through his fingers even as he tries to hold on to them.

Looking through The Cure's website, specifically the section called Words, I am reminded that much of Robert Smith's songbook is poetry that happens to be set to music. I suppose that songs are, in their simplest form, just that, but something about The Cure's discography speaks to me through imagery and word-magic.

I've been listening to them since the summer of '87. My cousin Shellie and I would drive to the beach everyday in her light blue convertible VW bug with the top down and The Cure's album Standing on the Beach/Staring at the Sea: Singles blasting. For me, that is their iconic songbook--"Boys Don't Cry," "10:15 on a Saturday Night," "Killing an Arab," "The Lovecats"...Shellie and I would sing our hearts out as we drove on SR 46 to New Smyrna Beach, Cape Canaveral National Seashore to be exact. This memory brings back other memories of when we were wee girls, and our families stayed at the beach in Flo and Ernie's house in New Smyrna before the feds bought that part of the beach. Back then it was just "the beach" to us. My dad, Shellie's dad (my dad's brother), and their sister and all the spouses and kids would hole up in the airy house with cedar siding and a loft that was reached by a ladder-stair--not quite a ladder, but not quite stairs, either--all summer and play in the ocean all day and have crab and shrimp boils at night. The parents would stay up late, drinking and smoking (everybody smoked back then) and playing pinochle until early the next morning. Us kids would wake up as soon as the sun hit the horizon and was just beginning to turn the sky creamy peach and run screaming in our still-damp bathing suits down the rickety wooden stairs over the dune to the surf. One unfortunate parent (I think now they had to have drawn straws) would wake up and come down to the beach to make sure none of us drowned. My cousins and I would sit on innertubes and float out as far as we dared--and sometimes that was miles it seemed away from the beach--and then use our hands as paddles and "row" back in to shore, and do it all over again. We wore zinc oxide on our noses but no other sunscreen and we would all burn to little kid-crisps--my family is of Scotch-Irish-German descent with a little Cherokee thrown in for good measure, and nobody gave any thought to the future skin cancers we would all get.

Good times.

Anyway, here are the lyrics for "A Letter to Elise." 



Oh Elise it doesn't matter what you say
I just can't stay here every yesterday
Like keep on acting out the same
The way we act out
Every way to smile
Forget
And make-believe we never needed
Any more than this
Any more than this
Oh Elise it doesn't matter what you do
I know I'll never really get inside of you
To make your eyes catch fire
The way they should
The way the blue could pull me in
If they only would
If they only would
At least I'd lose this sense of sensing something else
That hides away
From me and you
There're worlds to part
With aching looks and breaking hearts
And all the prayers your hands can make
Oh I just take as much as you can throw
And then throw it all away
Oh I throw it all away
Like throwing faces at the sky
Like throwing arms round
Yesterday
I stood and stared
Wide-eyed in front of you
And the face I saw looked back
The way I wanted to
But I just can't hold my tears away
The way you do
Elise believe I never wanted this
I thought this time I'd keep all of my promises
I thought you were the girl I always dreamed about
But I let the dream go
And the promises broke
And the make-believe ran out...
So Elise
It doesn't matter what you say
I just can't stay here every yesterday
Like keep on acting out the same
The way we act out
Every way to smile
Forget
And make-believe we never needed
Any more than this
Any more than this
And every time I try to pick it up
Like falling sand
As fast as I pick it up
It runs away through my clutching hands
But there's nothing else I can really do
There's nothing else I can really do
There's nothing else
I can really do
At all...