Songs about love never get old, especially the ones that just tear your heart to shreds — the ones that sing like an entry from a high school junior's online journal.

I savor the anguish that comes from a good "Don't Think Twice," by Bob Dylan, or "Sea of Heartbreak," by Johnny Cash. Man, guitar and emotional pain. What a sublime combination.

And now I'm enamored of a new sob song by the North Carolina folk band The Avett Brothers. It's called "Find My Love," off the recently released album "The Gleam."

"How can you tell when goodbye means goodbye, not just for now, for the rest of your life?" it asks, rhetorically. "How can you stand there with love in your eyes, and still be walking away?"

But it's not some whiney narrator lamenting a noncommittal boyfriend. The narrator addresses a universal "you" — the "you" in all of us who has somehow managed, at one time or another, to let go of a good thing or kiss a last kiss while love still lingered.

And then it's asking, why on earth do people do that? How is that possible, when sometimes it feels like all we can really hope for in this world is deep affection from others?

I guess this beautiful, harrowing, tragicomic, ever-elusive thing called love — which we spend entire lifetimes chasing, finding, losing, holding — sometimes just doesn't cut it.

As Don Henley and Patti Smyth taught us: "There's a reason why people don't stay where they are/Baby, sometimes love just ain't enough."

Is it all in the timing, so that if respective journeys don't align, desire dwindles? Or perhaps it's an illusion: If somebody is able to walk away, it means she never really loved you in the first place.

You can ponder and ponder on it, but in the end, you'll only find more questions to ask.

The best we can really hope for are good tunes to cry by. And here's one worth a listen.

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Hillary Rhodes is an asap staff reporter.

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