Hadawatha Illana Lyrics by Neil Warnakulasuriya

The love and affection my heart asked for,
I never got it…
Is it worth shedding a tear over that?
There’s no point in dwelling on it…

Between love and tears,
I hold a strange kind of love, my friend…

This love is the root of both joy and tears, all the world over.
Knowing that, don’t go joining yourself to tears and weeping on and on…
I don’t need love in my life.
I’ll smile again tomorrow…

The love my heart asks for…

It’s only a friendship, so why do you run off searching for love?
Why wear yourself out, weeping, grieving, letting out these sighs?
Unable to stay even briefly in a dream, shedding tears and aching with sorrow…

The love my heart asks for…

A young man has had his heart broken. The love and tenderness he longed for never came his way, and the song opens with him trying to talk himself out of the pain. Is it really worth crying over, he asks, what good does it do to keep turning it over in his mind? You can hear him being brave on the surface while the hurt sits right underneath.

What gives the song its ache is the idea he keeps circling back to: that love and tears come from the same place. He calls what he carries “a strange kind of love,” a love that lives somewhere between affection and crying. He even tells himself that love is the root of both happiness and sorrow the whole world over, so knowing that, he doesn’t want to keep tying himself to tears and weeping on and on. He decides he doesn’t need love in his life at all, that he’ll just smile again tomorrow. It is the kind of thing people say when they are trying to convince themselves more than anyone else.

In the last part, the voice turns outward, almost as if he is speaking to the other person, or to a friend who is hurting the same way. He says what they had was only a friendship, so why chase after it as though it were love? Why exhaust yourself crying and sighing over it? The line about not being able to stay even for a moment in a dream is the saddest touch. Even sleep won’t give him a little time with the one he wants, the dream slips away before it can hold, and he wakes to the same tears.

What the listener is left with is that gap between what the head decides and what the heart keeps asking for. He tells himself again and again to let go, that he’ll be fine, that he doesn’t need this love. But the line he returns to every time is “the love my heart asks for,” and the heart, of course, never stops asking.