Okay, so it isn't exactly poetry. But the melody of the song, Road Home, and the voice of the Taiwanese singer, Wang Zhong Ping, is haunting and squeezes my heart. Truly.
I confess -- I have a weakness for love songs, and the more sentimental and melancholic they are, the better.
The robust-minded would want to gag at all this, of course. But I suspect there must be enough people like me around, or how else can the popularity of modern music, which examines love more than any other theme, be explained.
Why this penchant for love songs?
Because, I suppose, I am an incorrigible romantic. Love, romance, and all that mushy stuff are never far from my mind. Lyrics proclaiming the wonders of falling in love appeal to me, and I find tales of love-lorn couples, well, fascinating.
I like love songs because I can empathise with the feelings they evoke. They articulate emotions I have felt in my own romances, and listening to them can be cathartic.
Take Randy Crawford's One Day I'll Fly Away. She is defiant as her soaring voice warns: "I'll make it alone/When love is gone.../Why live life from dream to dream?"
Or Boyz II Men's anguished cry in Eng Of The Road. Here, pride no longer matters to a man as he pleads with his lover to come back to him: "The pain in my head/Oh I'd rather be dead."
Then there is Beverley Craven's Promise Me. A woman has to leave her man (for a job in another city, perhaps?), but she wants an assurance that he will be waiting for her.
On their last day, she sings: "It's four o'clock in the morning/And I'm right where I want to be/Losing track of time/But I wish that it was still last night."
Love songs play on a memory. They trigger remembrances of old loves, past happiness and sadness. And even if the recollections are bad, they have a bittersweet quality when recalled through music.
Whenever i hear John Waite's Missing You, for example, my mind roams back to a room with dark blue walls and a morning meeting with a friend, the sun beating on the window pane behind us, that song playing on the radio. We broke up a few months after that day.
On a happier note, all the songs in Anita Baker's 1986 Rapture album, especially that operatic Caught Up In The Rapture, capture again the thrill of falling in love and the early stages of a particularly happy romance.
Love songs need not be slow-moving and mournful.
One of my all-time favourites is The Pretenders' Don't Get Me Wrong. It starts with a bold toe-tapping drum beat, followed by singer Christie Hynde shouting about the wonder of being in love: "Don't get me wrong/If you say hello and I take a ride/Upon a sea where the mystic moon/Is playing havoc with the tide."
Or Emil Chao's Actually I Am Not Thinking Of Leaving, whose happy beat always makes me smile and hum along.
Love songs need not even be in a language I am familiar with. I don't know French, but I have a tape of sultry numbers by Patricia Kaas that I play over and over again. Like the Mandarin songs I listen to but can only half comprehend, I might not understand the words, but I know the emotions.
As someone once said, a love song is just a caress set to music, and that, I guess, is universal.
I have a theory. When it comes to love, there are two kinds of people in this world -- those who find it easily, and those who don't.
For the first group, the course of true love is, indeed, very smooth. They go to school, grow up, meet someone, fall in love and are in turn desired by the beloved.
Everything that follows fits like a glove. They marry, have children and proceed to lead a generally angst-free existence. Theirs is a lucky, if uneventful, life.
For the other group, the path of love is full of twists and turns. These people have problems finding the right partner, yet they keep on searching, shifting between happiness and despair.
For them -- and you can catch glimpses of this group in the Dear Aggie pages of tabloids -- life is a maze of passions almost akin to Wuthering Heights or a Qiong Yao drama.
Looking for love might be a nerve-racking journey, but you will never find any of them complaining that their lives are dull.
I had lunch recently with a girlfriend I had not seen for a long time.
We were, after so many years, still single and still undecided. We plunged immediately into comparing notes about our current relationships.
In between bites of tapas at one of those new Mediterranean restaurants, we concurred that we did not want to compromise our freedom. And, yes, we said with heavy shakes of the head, wouldn't it be scary to be stuck in a miserable relationship?
But after a while along this same vein, we noted, wryly, that these were exactly the same issues we had discussed when we last met. So what was new in our lives?
We concluded, cynically, that relationships were all the same. They begin thrillingly, and you find yourself doing exactly the sort of things you had done in the previous (failed) romance -- the cards and presents and Valentine Day roses and declarations of love.
Emotions than plateau out and, inevitably, there will be that sharp descent into disappointment and acrimony and tears and farewell (if matters are still civil enough for that).
Sometimes, we decided, embarking on a new romance was just too tedious. It almost makes you want to retire from the social scene with a good book. We talked on...
At the end of lunch, we returned to work with promises to meet again.
I don't know about my friend, but I am certain that the next time we see each other, we will still be discussing the ups and downs of romance.
But that's not such a bad thing, really. After all, as any love song would tell you, isn't it better to have loved and lost, than not to have loved at all?