Yanne Ai

I still remember it,
on my chest
you placed a kiss
and rested your head

In that warmth
I always felt,
left alone, I wept

Why do you go,
closing your eyes, wounding the heart?
no one has ever come this close like you

A bunch of flowers in my hands, an invitation,
I will always come looking for you

Wishes filled the bottom of my heart,
making you the queen
of a little family,
an infant reaching for everything,
you cannot leave me to my loneliness

Why do you go,
closing your eyes, wounding the heart?
no one has ever come this close like you

A bunch of flowers in my hands, an invitation,
I will always come looking for you

Why do you go,
closing your eyes, wounding the heart?
no one has ever come this close like you

A bunch of flowers in my hands, an invitation,
I will always come looking for you

This is a tender, pleading love song to someone about to leave. It opens in memory and closeness: I still remember, he says, how you placed a kiss on my chest and rested your head there. That remembered warmth is exactly what makes the present so lonely, and in it he has been left to weep alone.

The refrain is the ache of the whole song. Why do you go, closing your eyes and wounding my heart, when no one has ever come as close to me as you? He answers his own fear with a promise, holding out a bunch of flowers, an araadhana, an invitation, and vowing that he will always come looking for her.

Underneath the plea is a whole imagined future. His deepest wishes, he says, were to make her the queen of a little family, and he pictures an infant reaching for everything it needs, so she cannot simply leave him to his loneliness. It is a young man’s tender, slightly desperate attempt to hold on to someone by showing her the home and family he had already dreamed for them.