YOU NEVER REALLY KNEW ME (©Words and music by Paul F. Cowlan)

I’ve probably still got that letter somewhere. The coda quotes the original song.

An old, old song of mine came back to me today,
sitting here by the window, the sky overcast and grey.
First love, first heartbreak, at the age of seventeen.
When you grow older it’s easy to forget
just what those early heartbreaks mean.

You tend to say it was just young love,
and you didn’t know the first rules of the game;
but you can’t deny that, at the time,
you thought the world would never be the same again.
And you’d never known such pain.

That’s where it all started I suppose,
in love with love, and ripe to fall.
I still find it easy to lose my heart,
that hasn’t changed at all;
but though I’m not the fool I used to be
it would be difficult to say
just what I’ve learned since that young fool,
and the fool I am today.

It was just young love,
and I didn’t know the first rules of the game;
but now I know that, as you grow,
the world can never stay the same.
It can never be the same.

An old, old song of mine came back to me today;
the face of a girl, and the letter
that held all the words she couldn’t bring herself to say.
First love, first heartbreak. I never thought that I’d get by,
but I wrote her a song that I never played,
and I never asked her why.
And the song was my reply.

So now we’re just good friends,
and you can look right through me.
That’s how the story ends,
but you never really knew me.