Mount Lavinia

An empty page with no idea on it,
an emptiness where no feeling comes,
even love, now, is a vacuum,
a quarrel that keeps tangling itself,
this is the season when these poems won’t be written

Do you remember that day,
one red-hued evening,
the Mount Lavinia sky,
how it waited for us,
just for the two of us,
do you remember that day

When even a passing second
felt as long as an aeon,
and a day or two
felt like a great many lifetimes,
how we sat, heavy with thought,
trying to fit it all together,
do you remember that day

A nostalgic love song built around a single place and a single evening. It opens in the present, and the present is empty: a blank page, a feeling that will not come, love itself reduced to a vacuum and an endless, tangling quarrel. This, he says, is the barren season when the poems simply won’t be written, love and inspiration have both dried up.

Against that emptiness he sets one bright memory. Do you remember that day? he asks, one red-hued evening under the Mount Lavinia sky, when it felt as though the whole sky waited for us, just for the two of us. The famous seaside sunset becomes the backdrop of a love at its height, the exact opposite of the blankness he feels now.

The last verse captures how time bends when you are in love: a passing second felt as long as an aeon, a day or two felt like many lifetimes, and the two of them sat heavy with thought, trying to fit all that feeling together before it slipped away. The repeated do you remember that day is the ache of the whole song, a man in an empty present reaching back to one full, golden evening. Sung by Pathum Madusanka, composed by Tharindu Damsara to words by Kashyapa Kuruppuarachchi, it is a wistful song about lost love and the one perfect memory that outshines an empty now.