WE WERE ALL THERE AND ONE OF US WAS GONE
One of us was gone. The words are simple. Perhaps too simple for what has happened. They offer no explanation, nor do they try to give absence meaning.They simply establish a new reality: there was an us, and now something within it is missing. But absence is not the opposite of presence. What disappears can remain strangely physical — in familiar places, in gestures that continue after they have lost their purpose, in the instinct to look where someone used to be.
Even memory does not solve this.It preserves and erases at the same time. The closer we try to hold on to what has gone, the more aware we become of the distance. Perhaps that is why We Were All There never really asks who has disappeared. The more difficult question is what happens to us when one of us is no longer there.
WE WERE ALL THERE
I brought the blue into the room
With words, without a sound
A sad, sad song starts playing somewhere
It appeared when I turned around
And we all knew what it meant
Though no one said a thing
Somewhere between the leaving
And what the leaving brings
We were all there together
Waiting beside the track
Watching the light move past us
Knowing what it couldn’t bring back
Some things arrive like weather
Some things refuse to stay
I hold you closer in my arms
As you slip away
I have never
Ever, ever known
Where the love goes
When the light has gone
Where can it go
When there’s nowhere left to go?
How do you carry love
When there’s no one left to hold?
Our house was still the way it was
The windows looked the same
Morning entered without asking
As if nothing had gone wrong
I heard the birds singing in the garden
They didn’t seem to know
For a moment something moved there
Then the morning let it go
I have never
Ever, ever known
Where the love goes
When the light has gone
Where can it go
When there’s nowhere left to go?
How do you carry love
When there’s no one left to hold?
We were all there together
Then one of us was gone