With Me You Will Stay

You come from far away
With pictures in your eyes
Of coffeeshops and morning streets
In the blue and silent sunrise
But night is the cathedral
Where we recognized the sign
We strangers know each other now
As part of the whole design

*Oh, hold me like a baby
That will not fall asleep
Curl me up inside you
And let me hear you through the heat

You are the jester of this courtyard
With a smile like a girl's
Distracted by the women
With the dimples and the curls
By the pretty and the mischievous
By the timid and the blessed
By the blowing skirts of ladies
Who promise to gather you to their breast

Oh, hold me like a baby*

You have hands of raining water
And that earring in your ear
The wisdom on your face
Denies the number of your years
With the fingers of the potter
And the laughing tale of the fool
The arranger of disorder
With your strange and simple rules
Yes now I've met me another spinner
Of strange and gauzy threads
With a long and slender body
And a bump upon the head

Oh, hold me like a baby*

With a long and slender body
And the sweetest softest hands
And we'll blow away forever soon
And go on to different lands
And please do not ever look for me
But with me you will stay
And you will hear yourself in song
Blowing by one day

Oh, hold me like a baby*

"Gypsy" ~ Suzanne Vega

The same song taken from her 1987 album 'Solitude Standing' and written when she was nineteen. The song has been in memory for 34 years now, yet it never sounds old. And she had kept her voice, which remains as pristine and beautiful as ever.




*******
i had taken the liberty to borrow two phrases from hers. In its simplicity, it captures perfectly the meaning behind the words, without being simplistic.

Once upon a time
In a place forsaken by memories
A soul comes along
An arranger of disorder
Bringing hope to another
With her strange and simple rules

The sun shines bright
 The warm wind blows
Together they walk along without a care
 The cold wraps around him
At the day's end
 As the train starts to move
As the wheels begin to turn
 His heart knows the old longing for her
Gazing at her silhouette in the darkening sky
 As he stood there to see her beautiful face once more
He bids her farewell 
 And think of her beside him again

There are some people we never forget even when their time with us is but a flicker of light in the dark. They passed through our lives and were never meant to stay with us. They may have left our lives but the light stays in our hearts. We moved on. Perhaps we will meet them again in another time.

For the longest time, i had this kind of 'vision'. My life is a line. The other person i met has another line. The two lines somehow intersect at some point in our lives. Those that were meant to be together stays on the same line until one of us leave this world. Those not meant to be will continue on their own line, to lived their lives, after this short intersection.

In this short intersection, we learned something that should be cherished perhaps. i do not know what i had learned. i only knew that short intersection on the line makes me smile a little during the occasional moments when consciousness chooses this particular memory for reminiscence.

"If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they're yours; if they don't they never were." ~ Richard Bach.

Yes, the meaning of these words are only apparent in retrospect.