Forever Blue part four - The end of everything

This is my final post about this album. This has been a walk straight back through time, and at times I felt like a part of me was stuck in that green chair, unable to move forward. After revisiting myself all those years ago, I feel I've helped that part of me get up and move forward with the rest of me. Even though I can see myself and the room as clear as if it was yesterday (and I don't expect that to change) my soul must gather itself and leave that room. 

This song, The end of everything, is very simple lyrically and sentiment, but it is complicated in action. The song is about the end of a relationship. Very simple. Except Chris Isaak says, "I don't know what to do. In my heart I still love you." Now, very complicated. I've seen people stuck like this, unable to move on, unable to do the reasonable thing, unable to extricate themselves from a bad relationship, all because they are still very much in love. It's sad, yet it shows the power of our emotions. Even though it isn't healthy for that person to stay stuck, I can still admire the tenacity of love like that. I don't have a love or loyalty like that right now. But I did. 

The title of the song is an overstatement. The end of a relationship is not the end of everything, even though it feels that way. The more of ourselves we put into a relationship, the more it hurts when it ends. It feels like a literal end of everything, but it is not. People who feel that often way lack confidence in themselves surviving on their own or finding happiness beyond that person they're attached to. I can understand that. I've listened to a former coworker describe taking a hit (domestic abuse) as love. The same woman told me her husband's gambling habit could not be worse and his talking to ladies online wasn't acceptable, and also that his drinking had become a problem (an understatement, as he threw his lawnmower in a tree where it became stuck while in a drunken rage), but she wouldn't leave him. Because he'd be lost. And she loved him. I applaud a love like that, but, honey, you can love him from a safe distance. Perhaps she knew more than I did. Perhaps she knew he'd self-destruct and kill himself. I don't know. All I know is he took two people down with him, and that's a waste of two lives when it could have been only one. 

When Kate cheated on me the first time, I knew I should have left her. I contemplated it. I felt lost. I didn't want to let her down either. She'd have to move back in with her mom or something. And I didn't want her to humiliate me, even though she already had. I didn't want anyone to know what she'd done. And I wasn't one to give up easily. I knew she'd come to regret her actions someday and value me as the guy who wouldn't quit on her. The irony is it took so long that I actually did quit on her. By the time she realized what kind of man I was, I was done. 

I like this song because it's so simple yet so complicated. It conveys the hyperbole of emotions after leaving a relationship. It truly is not the end of everything, yet it feels like nothing could be truer. Sometimes it feels like you could die right along with the relationship. How many people have killed themselves or their partners after their relationships end? Sadly, too many. For those of us who have gotten out of abusive, neglectful, hurtful, or dead-end relationships, we know something dies. But it doesn't have to be us.