Dura Akahe

Like rain that came pouring down out of nowhere
I don’t remember what day I met you
When all of it comes back to me, my heart aches
(I keep wondering what we ever met for…)
What we met for

(This moonlight, this crowd of stars…)
This moonlight and this crowd of stars are mocking me
They’re mocking me
That face of yours stays in my memory every day
It stays in my memory

Far in the sky, every night
Far in the sky, every night

Looking into the distance, we went searching for ourselves
We drew ourselves into the shining stars
That star is you, that star is me
Staring far away, you said it to the sky
But…
The gap between you and me,
the distance in between, is light years, so what you see today
is my past, my past burning as it goes out
That what came into memory would become a parting kept in memory,
somehow I already knew that, along the way
I waited this long, hoping we would fit
But…
our hearts never did fit, heh
Everything rests, more than on love,
on the understanding between two people
I was still looking for myself
at the time you found me
The far stars turned into black holes

This moonlight and this crowd of stars are mocking me
They’re mocking me
That face of yours stays in my memory every day
It stays in my memory

Like rain that came pouring down out of nowhere….

Far in the sky, every night
Far in the sky, every night

What I made up about you
What I said for you
To take all of it in, about you
Come to the show

What I made for you
What I said about you
To take all of it in, about you
Come to the show

It starts with rain, the sudden kind that falls out of a clear sky with no warning at all, and that is how a young man remembers her turning up in his life. He cannot even fix the day they met. What stayed with him is the ache that arrives when the whole thing plays back in his head, and the question sitting under it, what were we for.

The chorus puts him outside at night. Moonlight, a sky crowded with stars, and both of them are laughing at him. Anyone who has been left behind knows that feeling, when a beautiful night turns into an insult because there is nobody beside you to show it to. Her face is there every single day, whether he asks for it or not.

The rap verse takes the night sky and turns it into the whole argument. The two of them used to look up together and pick out stars, that one is you and that one is me, a game lovers everywhere play. Then he uses that same game against himself. The distance between them now is measured in light years, and light from a far star is old light, so the person she sees today is only his past, still burning even as it goes out. The stars they once claimed for themselves have collapsed into black holes.

His verdict comes in the plainest lines of the song, and it is a generous one. Love was never what ran short. Two people hold together on how well they understand each other, and their hearts never lined up that way. Then the sharpest line of all, that he was still searching for himself at the very time she found him. He is talking about timing there, not blame, and that is what keeps the whole song from curdling into bitterness.

The last few lines step out of the story and speak straight to the listener, an invitation to come and hear it performed live. It reads as a tag on the recording rather than part of the heartbreak, so what you are left holding is the image before it, two stars that once had names, now pulling everything in and giving nothing back.