Ultraviolence

The lyrics portray a speaker revisiting a painful experience from the past. Repeated questions about who witnessed or felt something suggest loneliness, as if no one else fully understood what happened. The mood shifts from hurt and memory toward a brief admission that everyone makes mistakes, including the speaker, and finally toward leaving. That ending may signal a desire to move on, though it does not promise that the pain is gone.

The “dark eyes” and “cold hands” are vivid, unsettling images linked to a person or encounter, but the lyrics never explain exactly what they refer to. “Burn my skin” and “burn my soul” may describe intense emotional pain rather than literal injury. The repeated phrases “all those years ago” and “all those tears ago” connect the passage of time with grief: years have passed, but the memory still carries feeling.

The song leaves the central event deliberately unclear. It could concern a troubled relationship, a frightening encounter, or another private wound; the words do not settle on one explanation. “Everybody makes mistakes” might offer forgiveness, self-reproach, or both. Likewise, “just be free” and “time to go” sound like a decision to release the past, but they may also express the struggle to escape something that remains “within.”