Love songs.

Love has changed shape and texture, from soft and light and floating into something more stately. From pink cotton candy held aloft by a child's sticky hands, smiles charged with sugar, into a thick oak chest against a scuffed bedroom wall, filled with balls of socks and old underwear. It's the marriage of folded t-shirts resting on top of each other in a crooked drawer.

Now songs like these make me turn my eyes away, almost embarrassed. How naive, how young you sound, singing "you walked into the room just like the sun" against your earnest acoustic guitar. Love isn't "you and me will bloom on the windowsill." Blooms wilt and die. Sunlight fades. You can't live like that forever, now can you?

Still, it's no small mourning, hearing this and thinking of a time when love was a thrum of electricity in the blood. Holding hands on the curb at night. Walking home one summer morning, delirious, drunk with kisses. Hands tangled in hair, words on a page, a voice in your ear, a smile to live in. Love isn't that. You silly, happy fools.