Not only are her friends unreliable, but they “try to fill me with doubt.” It is the “risk that comes with your embrace” that draws her to the figure who has rescued her from a “world of loneliness.” Her admittance that this situation is “draining all of me” is justified further by her perception of herself as a martyr of passion: “I’ll be wearing these scars for everyone to see.”įinally, we are not merely left with an exploration of how the psyche and soul are affected by passionate unrest, but a justification of that state of being. Consequently, it allows her to justify her own misery expressed in the startlingly visualized-but brutally, beautifully wrenching-poetic flourish of the song: “You cut me open and I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love.” It’s a song about the defenseless exposure engendered by a kind of love that is so profound that it explodes her numbness and “frozen” state. Lewis tells an extraordinary story that is even, at times, perplexing in its exploration of the blatant and breathless insanity that true love requires. The speaker claims: “I don’t care what they say I’m in love with you / They try to pull me away, but they don’t know the truth.” Her friends, who try to intervene on her behalf, are merely blinded. Despite the pleas of her friends who think that she’s “going crazy,” she confines herself with a partner who causes her heart to be “crippled by the vein that I keep on closing.” She only vaguely describes the basis of what she goes through, but it provides her with a passion that is so vibrant it clouds her judgment, thus leaving her emotionally crippled.
Leona Lewis’s mournfully shattering “Bleeding Love” offers a distressing tale of romance a narrative about a woman trapped in a relationship that provides her with spiritual happiness but emotional and psychological turmoil.