Will The Sun Shine Again

For many years she had avoided thinking about the end of her time with the boy. He had touched her in so many places, made her think about things, about life in a way that no one else had. She had given herself to him so completely, so deeply that in some ways it was hard to see where she ended and he began.

It was more than love and more than trust. There was a connection between them that she couldn’t verbalize or explain to anyone. She loved to watch him. He didn’t have to be doing anything in particular, it just made her feel good to watch him. There was something mesmerizing about him and it wasn’t any one thing.

When her friends would ask what she found so attractive she would stumble and stutter because she didn’t know how to empty the contents of her heart, how to share the things that you feel but cannot say.

So she would speak of his eyes and his wrists. She would talk about the way his lips felt on hers and how when she hugged him she felt never felt safer. She told them about how he looked at her like she was the most beautiful woman in the world and that when he put his hand on her hip she felt electricity.

Sometimes she wanted to say more. Sometimes she wanted to tell them everything that she felt because it seemed selfish not to share something so amazing and wonderful with them. And in some way it was so hard not to try and bond with them over something so important to her.

In the end she never did share any of that with them. She came close one day but faltered when her girlfriend suggested that all girls felt this way about their first. It bothered her because she felt that it cheapened and degraded what she had so she just smiled and said nothing.

The end of their relationship had damaged her. It had broken her in ways that she didn’t really understand until many years later. The men that followed the boy were measured against his memory. At first it was conscious, but subconscious. That is, she couldn’t help but compare them and though she knew it was unfair she persisted in the unconscious search for the one who would make her forget the pain and the empty feeling.

It was an empty hollow feeling. There was a sense of things having been turned upside down. It reminded her of something she had seen on a field trip she took in second grade. They had gone to the zoo and were in the reptile house looking at turtles. The zookeeper turned his back and one of the boys took the turtle and flipped it upside down.

She remembered watching the turtle flop around, legs kicking in the air as it tried desperately to right itself. And it occurred to her that she felt a little bit like the turtle. In some ways her world had barely changed and in others it had been turned upside down.

After the breakup it was months before she let another boy kiss her. It was horribly awkward and uncomfortable. He grabbed her and shoved his tongue in her mouth while his hands roamed all over her body. She wanted to push him away and run but she was tired of crying herself to sleep and thought that if could endure this it might help her move on.

It did not.

And neither did the boy who came along that summer or the three that followed him.

The problem was that subconsciously she was still looking for him. When they kissed her she would close her eyes and try to lose herself in the moment but all of the little details made it clear that they were not him. They smelled differently, their breathing had a different rhythm and their touch was not quite right.

It was a long time before she allowed any of them to do more than kiss her and that was only because she forced herself to. It had been almost two years and she had decided that her university life had to have something more to it than studying and casual dating.

For a time it worked. For a time she felt like things were better and that she might be able to fall in love again. And in a way she did. The cloud that had followed her lifted a little and the sun began to shine again.

But in her heart she knew that it was never quite as sunny and that the skies were not quite so blue as they had been. The jagged hole didn’t hurt the same way it had used to and the familiarity of the pain was replaced with something else.

Now with the grace of time and distance she was finally able to see that the relationships that followed had all been doomed because she had been unwilling to let them work. It made her nervous and she wondered if she had spent so many years teaching herself how to be more detached that we would never be able to really give herself to someone again.

"She put him out like the burnin' end of a midnight cigarette
She broke his heart he spent his whole life tryin' to forget
We watched him drink his pain away a little at a time
But he never could get drunk enough to get her off his mind
Until the night

He put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger
And finally drank away her memory
Life is short but this time it was bigger
Than the strength he had to get up off his knees
We found him with his face down in the pillow
With a note that said I'll love her till I die
And when we buried him beneath the willow
The angels sang a whiskey lullaby

(Sing lullaby)

The rumors flew but nobody knew how much she blamed herself
For years and years she tried to hide the whiskey on her breath
She finally drank her pain away a little at a time
But she never could get drunk enough to get him off her mind
Until the night

She put that bottle to her head and pulled the trigger
And finally drank away his memory
Life is short but this time it was bigger
Than the strength she had to get up off her knees
We found her with her face down in the pillow
Clinging to his picture for dear life
We laid her next to him beneath the willow
While the angels sang a whiskey lullaby"

(Sing lullaby)

Whiskey Lullaby- Brad Paisley