Iki Gasa Handana Lyrics by Amarasiri Peiris

Sobbing over a past that’s gone

Bargaining away my days along with my tears
I had a love of my own that was never really mine

Fooling me with dream after dream, all through the night
Even now, in the dead of midnight, my heart takes flight
I wake from sleep and search again in the dark
I had a love of my own that was never really mine
A love of my own that was never mine

Like a wound that just won’t heal
I keep soothing it with nothing but my sighs
And where I can’t bear it any longer, the hot tears come pouring down
I had a love of my own that was never really mine
A love of my own that was never mine
A love of my own that was never mine

A man is left alone with the memory of a love he lost, and he can’t stop crying over it. That’s where this song lives, in the small hours of the night when there’s nothing to distract him and the grief comes back on its own. The line he returns to again and again says everything: he had a love that was his, and yet it was never truly his. That ache of holding someone in your heart who was never really yours to keep is the whole song.

The feeling deepens as it goes. At first he’s just sobbing over the past, trading away his days along with his tears. Then night falls and the dreams begin. In Sinhala song a love that visits you “in dream after dream” and fools you is a tender, cruel thing, the mind gives you back the person you lost only while you sleep, and then snatches them away the moment you wake. So he wakes in the dark and starts searching all over again for someone who isn’t there, and his heart, even at midnight, lifts and flies off toward her on its own.

By the last verse the wound has become physical. He compares his sorrow to an injury that never heals, the kind you can only press and soothe, and all he has to soothe it with are his own sighs. And when even that isn’t enough, when he reaches the place where he simply can’t carry it anymore, the hot tears spill over. That image of warm tears finally breaking loose is what closes the song, not as a release that brings peace, but as the overflow of a grief he’s been holding back as long as he could.

What stays with you is that one phrase, “a love of my own that was never mine.” It’s the quiet contradiction at the heart of so much longing, loving someone completely and still losing them, carrying a bond that belonged to you in feeling but never in life. Anyone who has grieved a love that slipped away will recognize the man crying alone in the dark here.