Can’t Feel It Anymore

words & music by Doug Howell (4 Sep 1980)

you telephoned
how can you sound so close, yet distant
we keep pretending time is nonexistent
you’re laughing like you used to do
but the most that I can seem to do is
smile at the illusions I had planned
cause now I hold your laughter in my hand
somehow it’s lost the power of command

I can’t feel it anymore
can’t conceal it anymore
neither joy nor pain can enter through a bolted door
and I can’t feel it anymore

ghost towns
they lived here once, but now they’re gone
they gave up all the hopes they’d counted on
just reminders of what used to be
just tumbleweeds and dust, and tell me,
what sense would there be in going back
to all those empty streets and swirling sand?
how many disillusionments can love withstand?

I can’t feel it anymore
can’t conceal it anymore
neither joy nor pain can enter through a bolted door
and I can’t feel it anymore

there’s no turning back
once the current starts to flow
there’s no changing courses
once the wind begins to blow
don’t think love can last
if you refuse to let it grow

what sense would there be…
to all those empty streets and swirling sand?
how many disappointments can our love withstand?

I can’t feel it anymore
can’t conceal it anymore
neither joy nor pain can enter through a bolted door
and I can’t feel it anymore

℗ © 1986 Dweller by the Light Stream Music, assigned to Creative Measures (ASCAP)

2011 Notes

About the time I wrote this, I found myself at the end of a string of failed relationships. Quite an accomplishment at 28. ‘Course you may say, when a gay boy falls for a string of straight boys, you can’t expect it to turn out too well. Yes, true, but you’re forgetting: I hadn’t figured that part out yet, had I? (We grow ’em slow out on the farm.) All I knew is that I was falling in love. I couldn’t even see how I was smothering every one I loved with my incredible, unquenchable need.

Strangely enough, the hallmark of hopeless romantics (and if you don’t think I’m a card-carrying member, you haven’t heard enough songs yet) is hope. That’s how you know you’re in real trouble: when the hope evaporates. In your early adventures, you take your pummeling and move on. But after a string of rejections, you start sensing that armor and it just gets heavier and heavier, darker and darker, choking what little is left of any feeling, until that blank, horrible, empty moment comes when you realize that all you hoped for in this relationship—or any other—is irretrievably gone. There’s no going back. There’s no going forward. It’s just over. Ghost towns. It’s not just where you’ve ended up this time and several times before. It’s where you always end up, and there’s never going to be a different ending.

Again, no up-tempo praise song here. But that doesn’t mean there’s no praise. It’s still there, but it may be harder to find. It may seem dark and empty. But you just keep breathing, keep moving, keep singing, keep praying, and you feel like a zombie for a while. But then, somehow, one spring day, you catch yourself starting to believe that maybe the story isn’t over yet. Maybe there will be another ending, someday.