Adare Wedana Lyrics by Shane Zing

This much…
in a moment I met only hurt from you…
This pain is because of you now. Bearing the ache…
Your words of love, gone silent. My heart is crying…

The pain of love… fills my heart…
making me cry for all time… where did you go?
I became yours alone… I was completely yours.
I keep waiting forever… only for you…

Like a breeze… wrapped around my body…
we stayed close to each other, bound in our hearts…
like a fragrance through my whole life
the heart that guarded our solitude is now alone this night…

The pain of love…/

Like a secret… keeping it in my heart…
until I die… I will keep this love…
my affection… does not fade in my heart…
your love still means everything to me…

The pain of love…/

A young man is left holding a love that is over for everyone but him. The person he gave his whole heart to has gone, and in a single moment all he got back was hurt. The song opens right inside that wound. Her loving words have fallen silent, and with that silence his heart breaks. He is not angry at her, he is just aching, carrying the pain because it came from someone he still cares about.

The line that names the whole song, adare wedana, means “the pain of love,” and that is exactly the feeling he keeps circling back to. It fills him, it makes him cry, and he cannot understand where she went or why. Even now he says he is completely hers, still waiting, still living only for her, long after she has stopped waiting for him.

The middle verse is where he remembers how close they once were. He reaches for two soft Sinhala images that mean comfort and belonging. He says she was wrapped around him like a breeze, light and constant, always there against his skin. Then he calls her a suwanda, a fragrance, that ran through his whole life, the way a scent lingers in a room and you cannot point to it but you feel it everywhere. The heart that once kept the two of them company, that guarded their being alone together, is the same heart sitting alone tonight. That is the quiet cruelty of the song, the very thing that once meant togetherness now means loneliness.

By the end he makes a kind of promise. He will keep this love hidden like a secret and guard it until the day he dies. His affection has not shrunk, not even a little, and her love still means everything to him. There is no hope of her coming back in these lines, and he knows it. What is left is a man choosing to hold on anyway, carrying a love that hurts simply because letting it go would mean letting her go too.