Esa Getena Lyrics by Shihan Mihiranga

In your eyes live ten thousand dreams,
as much as I searched only for you.
In your eyes live ten thousand dreams,
as much as I searched only for you.
Knowing those eyes would never be mine,
still I kept on loving you.
Still I kept on loving you.

You don’t know it, but the whole world does.
You don’t know it, but the whole world does.

The wishes I made upon your eyes,
the prayers in those eyes were only ever mine.
Those wishes I made, those prayers I offered,
they ran down as a single tear.

You don’t know it, but the whole world does.
You don’t know it, but the whole world does.

The pity that pours from your eyes,
the thoughts I think inside those eyes.
Pictures left half drawn, broken melodies,
in my dreams these are the sighs I let go.

You don’t know it, but the whole world does.
You don’t know it, but the whole world does.

A young man is in love with a girl who has no idea how he feels, and the whole song is him saying it out loud to everyone except her. He looks at her eyes and sees a thousand dreams in them, and admits that no matter where he turned, he was only ever looking for her. The ache underneath it all is that he loved her knowing full well she would never be his. He kept loving anyway.

That one repeated line, “you don’t know it, but the whole world does,” is the heart of the song. His feelings have become so plain that everyone around him can read them, and yet the one person they are meant for stays unaware. It is the particular loneliness of a love you carry in silence, where you are the most obvious thing in the room to everybody but the one you long for.

The eyes do a lot of work here. In Sinhala love songs the beloved’s eyes are where the whole person lives, so when he keeps coming back to her eyes, he means he keeps coming back to her. He says the wishes and prayers he made looking into those eyes ended up running down his own face as a tear, the quiet way longing turns into grief when it has nowhere to go. By the last verse he gives us the saddest images of all, pictures left half finished and broken tunes, the unfinished feeling of a love that was never allowed to become anything. What he is left with are sighs he lets out alone in his dreams.

It is a gentle, hurting song about loving someone from a distance and never being seen. The listener is left holding that one line, the world knows, she does not, and feeling how heavy it is to be that fully understood by everyone but the person who matters.