We never forget the ones we loved
If the feeling was strong and true,
No matter what happened, the push and shove
That separates me from you,
And those who came after, who took your place
Will never extinguish the spark,
That sits in the memory’s starkest place
After making new love in the dark.

For an old love’s more than a pretty face,
It’s more than a bunch of sighs,
It’s more than a fragile cobweb’s grace
That recalls the look in your eyes,
It sits together with faded youth
We recall on our darkest nights,
The pain, obsession, the laughter too
As the mirror of memory lights.

The further down we push it away
It comes when we least expect,
Bustling in from our salad days
With a feeling of sad neglect,
How did it stutter and how did it fail
Is the question that meets our eyes,
And then we remember the truth of it,
Our false and our feeble lies.

Whatever possessed us to stray back then
We made up the perfect two,
But you would get angry with me, my love,
And I would get angry with you,
So our footsteps strayed and we lost the way
To find our way home again,
I’d be with girls that I didn’t know
And you’d be with other men.

But we’re still back there in the years that fled
And we’ll be together again,
When people talk of the life we led
In that time of way back when,
There are certain times in my history
That I see as a strange purview,
When I was entranced by your mystery,
And you were just simply you.

David Lewis Paget