okay, you know what time it is!
Queer Temporality in Days We Left Behind ⏰
Looking back at white and black
Reminders of my past
Smoky bars and cheap guitars
But nothing built to last
Right away, Paul manages to render the past both vivid and inaccessible. We begin with old photos, recollections of a life reduced to images, remnants of what was. But at the same time, those remnants are reminders, active triggers rather than passive objects. Paul is not just looking back on his past— the past is pressing itself back upon him, too. The world he recalls may not have been built to last, but this sets up a distinction the rest of the song will build upon. The scene may not have lasted, but what formed within it did. No THING was built to last…but we’re not really talking about things, are we?
Nothing ever stays
Nothing comes to mind
No-one can erase
The days we left behind
Paul is not concerned with forgetting, but with the inadequacy of material objects. No THINGS stay, but no THINGS come to mind, anyway– no THING can fully contain the meaning of his lived experience. The days are behind him, but they aren’t gone; the past persists into the present in spite of change BECAUSE it is untouchable, uneraseable.
See the boys of Dungeon Lane
Along the Mersey shore
Some of them will feel the pain
But some were meant for more
The boys of Dungeon Lane are figures from the past, yet the language used for them isn’t exclusively retrospective. We can see them, now; some “will” feel pain; some “were meant” for more. What a dizzying little tense structure! Present and future and past and destiny are all wrapped up together. The effect is to make the past feel unfinished, as though it still contains its own future within the present memory. The Mersey shore is still, somehow, a space of anticipation.
Nothing stays the same
No-one needs to cry
Nothing can reclaim
The days we left behind
Here’s our Paul using form to mirror function again: nothing stays the same, not even the refrain of this song. Though his ever-present past is unerasable, it’s also unreclaimable; no THING can bring it, tangibly, into the now. Still– no one needs to cry.
We met at Forthlin Road
And wrote a secret code
To never be spoken
I stand by what I said
The promise that I made
Will never be broken
Phew! Okay! Lots going on here, folks. Forthlin is presented as the origin of a “secret code,” which itself is doing some heavy lifting. It’s a private language, but also a system of meaning for two. More than that, because they “wrote” it, code also sounds like form, pattern, composition— a structure created together. Paul’s relationship with John doesn’t simply persist as a feeling, but as a jointly authored symbolic order. And there's that strange tense-play again: the meeting and the writing happened in the past, but Paul stands by what he said with his feet firmly planted in the present, while the promise he’ll never break projects the bond into the future and beyond. Past origin, present fidelity, and future endurance all in six brief lines. This is not nostalgia, but an ongoing ontological vow.
Nothing ever stays
Nothing comes to mind
No-one can erase
The days we left behind
No one is going to replace or erase his code or his promise or his bond with John. It's theirs.
In the skies the skylarks rise
Above the sounds of war
Since that day I knew they'd stay
With me for evermore
This bond and these memories are active, so the scale continues to expand. We’ve moved from photos into bars into streets and shorelines and homes; now, finally, into the sky, a shift upward and outward. Songbirds rise above the sounds of war, not outside history but above it, cutting through it, outlasting it. They embody the song’s whole temporal logic: distance does not negate presence, and attachment follows the same pattern. It's no longer "here" in worldly, material terms, but it resonates on and on. A single day of knowing extends into evermore. A moment into endless duration.
'Cause nothing stays the same
And no-one needs to cry
No-one is to blame
For the days we left behind
Nothing stays the same, so we’ve got one more change to explore. This song seems to enact the whole cycle of identity work Paul has done after losing John: it moves from epistemic uncertainty to regulation to release. Here, finally, Paul seems to reach beyond acceptance. There's no forgetting, no detachment, no closure— just something like grace. Time changed what it changes. The bond endured what it endures. No more tears, no more blame. Paul has made his peace with the paradox.
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