Apa Hamuweema Lyrics by Namal Udugama

Is our meeting and our parting what love really is?
Don’t hurt me again, not in any life to come.
For always, may you stay the love I longed for.
Don’t go, parting in tears like we do today…

My love, I cried, bearing it all,
the pain that goes by the name of love.
As a remembrance of that mind’s journey,
my feelings will be written down.

Golden stars shone that day,
bringing fresh new thoughts.
This pain, carried in the name of love,
brings my prayers for the days to come.

A young man is standing at the moment of a goodbye, and instead of begging her to stay, he steps back and asks the bigger question: is this what love is, that two people meet only to part again? The opening line sets the whole mood. He is not angry, just quietly wounded, the way you are when something you loved is slipping away and there is nothing you can do about it.

The ache deepens when he reaches past this one life. “Don’t hurt me again, not in any life to come” carries the Buddhist idea of saṃsāra, the long chain of rebirths a Sri Lankan listener hears instantly in the word sansaaraya. He is saying their bond is older and longer than a single lifetime, and his plea is that even in the next birth, and the one after that, she will not put him through this pain again. In the same breath he turns it into a wish: for always, in every life, let her be the love he hoped for. It is the most Sri Lankan way of saying “I want to love you forever,” to fold forever into the cycle of rebirth itself.

What he holds onto is memory. He admits he cried and bore the pain that hides under the pretty name of love, and he decides to write it all down, his true feelings kept as a keepsake of that journey of the heart. The golden stars that shone “that day” are the night their love felt new and full of fresh dreams, the bright beginning he keeps returning to even as it ends.

By the close, the pain and the love have become the same thing, and he carries both forward as a prayer for the days to come. He is not asking for her back. He is asking that whatever comes, the love stays, and that the next parting, if there has to be one, will not be in tears like this one. That is what the listener is left holding, the quiet hope of someone who would rather love across lifetimes than let go.