"They" are the people around her. I'd say mainly adults, family (mother), perhaps neighbours, teachers.
I could imagine a situation like this: A child stumbles and falls and its parent says "Stop crying. Look how great ayu is, she doesn't cry". But they didn't understand the reason why she wasn't crying. And that's maybe why laughing became painful, too.
Here a quote from the "A Song for XX" liner notes.
Quote:
2. “A Song for xx” (Music/Arrangement: Yasuhiko Hoshino)
When we were making the album, this was the first track we produced. I always start off with lyrics by coming up with them in my head, and then writing them down after they’re perfectly ready. But with this song, even though I had the lyrics in my head, I couldn’t write. When I put them into words, it just became too real, and it took a long time for me to finally make that step.
I wrote the lyrics looking back on my childhood, and so their theme is the doubts and anxieties I had, and the things I felt. Because it’s about something so long ago, I could have hidden things if I wanted to, or I could have made myself into a more loveable child, or I could have made it a more beautiful story. But I don’t want to write lies, and I think that if I did those things I probably wouldn’t have been able to have made this album.
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I thought that part would be important.