Thawa Eka Serayak

If only I could meet you just one more time
I would tell you, without hiding it, that I love you
I have no patience left, my heart keeps asking about you
What am I to do, when I love you so

However many lotus flowers there are in the pond
In my heart I love just one of them
I long to gather that one flower in my hands
So it would be mine, for always

When the emptiness and the loneliness weigh on me
how am I to bear it,
even though you are not near
Even when we are in two different places, your fragrance lingers close to me

A young man is carrying a love he has never managed to say out loud, and the whole song is built around one simple wish: to meet her just one more time so he can finally tell her. He is not asking for much. He only wants the chance to say “I love you” plainly, without hiding it anymore. His heart has run out of patience, and it keeps turning back to her no matter what he does. That ache of holding something in, knowing it may already be too late, is where the song lives.

The heart of it is the lotus image in the second verse. He says the pond is full of lotus flowers, but his heart has chosen only one. In Sinhala song the lotus standing in still water is the picture of pure, untouched beauty, the kind you admire from a distance rather than grab at, so when he says he wants to gather that one flower into his own hands and keep it for always, he is saying something tender, not greedy. Out of everyone he could have loved, his heart settled on her alone, and he wants only her.

The last verse turns to what it feels like when she is gone. The emptiness and the loneliness press on him, and he does not know how to carry them. Then comes the line that lingers: even though they are apart, in two different places, her fragrance, her suwanda, stays close to him. In Sinhala a person’s suwanda is more than a smell, it is the trace someone leaves behind, the sense of them that stays in a room or on the heart after they have left. So he is telling us that distance has not taken her from him. She is not beside him, yet some part of her never leaves. That is what he is left holding, a love he may never get to speak, and the quiet comfort that she stays with him anyway.