"I love you, it's ruining my life."
A fortnight. Two weeks. A brief, flickering measure of time. Yet within it, Our Lady captures the weight of eternity compressed into memory: a love that lives on after its own ending, an emotion so intense that its echoes stretch beyond its duration.
This is impermanence in its most piercing form: the awareness that even what feels eternal is bound by change.
In Buddhist philosophy, this is the First Noble Truth: life contains dukkha - often translated as suffering, but more accurately, as the restlessness of impermanence.
We ache not because things end, but because we believed they could last.
"And for a fortnight there, we were forever"
The song's chorus itself becomes a teaching. A fortnight is finite. Precise. Contained. Yet its emotions spill far beyond the measure of days. This mirrors the Buddha's insight in the Dhammapada:
"All created things are transitory. He who knows this truly becomes weary of suffering; this is the path to purity." (Dhammapada 277)
To see impermanence clearly is not to despair; it is to awaken. Saint Tay's narrator doesn't turn away from pain or pretend transcendence; she lingers in it, naming it, circling its edges. The repeated confession, "I love you, it's ruining my life," is not indulgence - it is witnessing.
"I touched you for only a fortnight, but I touched you."
She allows the emotion to exist. Not to define her, but to be seen in its raw, impermanent truth.
This is the Buddhist practice of sitting with suffering. Not resisting, not clinging, not fleeing. Just breathing into that ache until its edges soften, and even sorrow becomes transparent.
In the Satipatthana Sutta, the Buddha teaches mindfulness of feeling: vedana.
"When feeling a painful feeling, he knows: 'I feel a painful feeling.'"
There is no judgment, only recognition.
To feel is to know, and to know is to free oneself from the illusion that feelings are permanent or defining. Our Lady does exactly this in "Fortnight." She does not run from the pain, nor does she demand closure. She simply acknowledges it.
"I love you, it's ruining my life."
The power lies in the directness.
"Your wife waters flowers. I want to kill her."
The pain is named; it breathes; it is allowed to pass.
"Thought of calling you, but you won't pick up. Another fortnight lost in America."
Alan Watts once wrote:
"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone."
Likewise, "Fortnight" is an act of stillness amid the mud. The gentle discipline of not stirring the water. When you cease to fight your feelings, they settle into clarity on their own.
In the arc of the song, the finite ("two weeks") meets the infinite (love, memory, grief).
This duality reflects the Buddhist teaching of interbeing: that every experience, no matter how small, contains the whole of existence. The briefest moment of love can illuminate a lifetime. "For a fortnight there, we were forever."
In this way, "Fortnight" becomes a koan of impermanence:
How can something that lasted two weeks echo through eternity?
The answer lies in presence. When you give yourself fully to any moment, in joy or in sorrow, that moment becomes timeless.
The pain of "Fortnight" is the pain of having lived deeply.
It is the trace left behind when impermanence is met with love instead of denial.
Sit quietly with your own "fortnight."
The memory that lingers. The love that ended. The version of yourself that couldn't last.
Breathe in the ache. Not to fix it, but to see it clearly.
You are not the pain. You are the awareness witnessing it.
As the Buddha said:
"Let go of what has passed, let go of what may come, and see the arising and passing of things, but be unmoved by them." (Udana 8.3)
To be unmoved does not mean to be numb.
It means to remain present as the world shifts,
as hearts change,
as even the deepest love dissolves,
and still to bow in reverence to its impermanent beauty.
For even in the fleeting,
there is truth that endures.
For even two weeks
can hold the whole sky.
In the name of the fleeting moments, and the hearts they leave behind, Amen.
