Midnight Blue

I Think We Can Make It

“Couple in the Park,” Vincent Van Gogh (1888)

For all of the times you told me you need me
Needing me now is something I could use
Midnight blue
Wouldn't you give your hand to a friend?
Maybe it's not the end

And I think we can make it
One more time
If we try
One more time for all the old times

Midnight Blue - Melissa Manchester (1975)

I’ve been writing to no one apparently, but this is often times the consequence of writing at all: that whomever you’re speaking to is not here; and even in these nominally noble struggles to voice your trepidations, your thoughtfulnesses, your romanticisms, it is not uncommon for them to be missed, or deliberately ignored. I wouldn’t dare provide a directory (like here and here), but I cannot let it go unmentioned that there is something missing within me which, in light of the respect that I have for you, I still do not think I’m entitled to feel. But fortunately, feeling is the bare minimum for what we will have left after our storm passed.

When Midnight Blue, written by Melissa Manchester and Carole Bayer Sager, was released in April 1975, Billboard magazine described it as “a classically elegant quiet ballad about a pair of longtime lovers putting aside their current aggravations until the dawn in order to try making it one more time in memory of all their old times together.”

There are ideas I have on the burner for how to explain these things and I think I will work on them more, presumably as the only effect they will have is a modest hope that we find each other again. Until then, I must be okay with being strangers again, and be okay with the cynical-inducing reality that you are falling in love. Nevertheless, I’ll put this down for awhile and turn my attention to other things; it doesn’t pay to be a sucker, but it pays to know that when people are done with you, there is nothing worth saying that will bring them back. I deserve that fact and now I must sleep with it.

So be it.