Evening On the Ground (or Regret)

(Lilith's Song)

I've covered the best line from a love song ever written. I've heard a lot of Iron & Wine's work - a clutch of albums and a handful of EP's - and although he has a lyrical romanticism, I don't think Sam Beam will even be considered for entry into a love song category. Even fleetingly.

But dammnit, the man is a wordsmith. And on the final track of the cracking Woman King EP - dense with tightly wound, almost spiteful folk songs - he drops what I consider the greatest line in a pop song ever.

Evening on the Ground is a loaded song. To me it feels as though it is an exercise in self-loathing, shouldering and issuing blame because of the loss of love. It hints to me that the lost love might refer to a dead child. There is the explicit reference to "rocks and baby bone", but that isn't conclusive in the context of the song. But for some reason the repetition of the "broken lock"to a garden is so evocative of children. Anyway, literally or metaphorically, the lyrics are powerful.

Especially this line:

We were born to fuck each other

One way or another

I'm not sure why, but it reminds me of a friend Ionce knew - a girl I was very very close to in junior high school. She was fiesty and funny and cool-headed and had the biggest heart you could imagine. And she was beautiful. And I was in love with her. I didn't need to be with her, I just needed to be around her.

When my parents broke up and I was angry, angry, angry, I would stay at her house for a week at a time, sometimes sleeping in the spare room and sometimes in with her. We never hooked up, we were just there for each other. Or mostly she was there for me. She lived with her mum - her dad had disappeared years ago - and her mum understood our connection and opened her arms to me like I was her own.

Then we moved to a new school - senior high - and we started drifting to different circles. We tried to stay close, but when she dropped out of school (it never did suit her style), she disappeared from of my life altogether.

Then years later when I had just moved to the big smoke I saw her on the street. In the dodgy part of town. She looked strange - sort of drawn - but we were genuinely so, so happy to see each other. We went for lunch. It was wonderful catching up, being around her again.

She asked me to go shopping with her - she was a dancer and needed some new gear. I said sure. She lead me into a sex shop. I'd been in one before, but didn't know what we were doing there. She showed me six-inch plastic fuck-me boots and asked what I thought. I should have put two and two together before, but I was still shocked. She was stripping. "Dancing" she insisted it was. Dancing with no clothes on.

I pulled her out on the street and asked her to be straight with me. The mask started to strip, but she kept insisting she was living her childhood dream of being a dancer. Buying the line she had been forced to sell to herself, and that club owners and punters had happily sold her. I asked if she was doing drugs. First "no", then "sometimes", then "no more than anyone else does". If anyone else does it every day.

I realised that on some level she wanted help. And by showing me her world in the way she did, she wanted me to help. But she wasn't ready enough to actually admit that she needed help, let alone accept it and make a fresh start. And I was a nineteen year old student, a dumb kid new to the city with no money of my own, and no balls to be the strong one.

I said I had to go. She asked me for my number - she wanted to hang out more (to try to lever herself into a new direction?). I didn't give it to her. She started to break down, the mask gone. She never wanted this, but she didn't know a way out. I didn't know what else to do. I walked away from her.

It is the greatest single regret of my life. I still don't know what I would have done. I wish I'd done something.

But I guess we were born to fuck each other one way or another...