What might have had the capacity to reinstate her sense and regard of “In A Little While” (perhaps even to the point of driving it irrevocably home) would have been if she had ever heard Bono sing “Goldeneye”. –Why? Because besides the externals Bono writes his songs about, there is also an existing continuity within his own body of art that is an entity unto itself, which is where this resides. This song was released precisely at the moment of their personal breaking, and reflects the sentiment wrought when she left him in her mind, correctly in context, a potent combination in terms of linking into Bono’s own seductive approach with the room she asked him to leave by literally catching the notion of her perspective she viewed through the frame witnessing the surface of the water, which became a transcendent frieze (“A Perfect Day Elise”) inside the feedback it was such a pivotal moment. It expressed the loss of the things she’d never known that would have saved her, how it felt to be abandoned when she fell.
And as he expressed cradle theft in the moment, it has another dimension entirely, and it so happens she could well perceive this as their moment. Caught like an insect in amber inside the breaking is the assertion, “You'll never know how I watched you from the shadows as a child”. When he expressed this, it was absolutely true, because she’d never possessed an awareness of The Joshua Tree B-sides, -precisely the tracks that “In a Little While” “Summer Rain” and “Always” deliberately linked into. Discovering them had been so strong it formed the culmination of her interior resurrection. She’d not quite told him that, but she’d told him when she discovered them and how profound it had been for her, how for her it had been the discovery of a Divine injunction to marry having begun for both in 1987. She’d told him what “Love Comes Tumbling” did in terms of predicting this from her side (without actually telling him), and how his predictions for this song had been right, and about only finding it after she’d been found in someone else, and why he’d been right about this. With this she divulged he’d ranged back in his linkages to her as far back as when she was thirteen years old. In the course of delineating the entire course to him, she’d have provided him with ample explanation for his objectifying her this way in “Goldeneye” (even though she hadn’t listed it, since it was covered by Tina Turner). Her revelations fully divulged cradle theft, in other words. Even if this communication did not affect by becoming incorporated into this work, in terms of the existing continuity with “Goldeneye”, he was already fully aware that in her context, he’d been engaged in cradle theft of sorts. This is shown by the song he wrote about their breaking rather than union, and what he isolated was where the real loss essentially lay in what she did not yet know, that he’d also felt impelled by God, what this severance robbed for him.
”In A Little While” works in direct restoration of everything he described as lost with “Goldeneye”, as otherwise expressed from within his own body of work. The cradle theft reference had also been depicted, separately and exclusively, in “Goldeneye”. And again this restoration was expressed inside terms of reference which just happened to be expressly what she’d told him. Just this one missing piece of the puzzle would have had the power to restore her.
You'll never know
How I watched you from the shadows as a child
You'll never know
How it feels to get so close and be denied
It's a gold and honey trap
I've got for you tonight
All the more interesting considering he shifted quite seamlessly here to the next track, which indeed was his honey trap, “Wild Honey”, for yes indeed, he’d predicted his tactic for the future. -It was art as seduction, -which was going to make him a hell of a lot of money. The threat of revenge here is as potent as any that can be made, threatening to sublimate her by whoring his sentiments towards her (and her as object) onstage every night, rather than ever in any way actualizing the connection or acknowledging it. (Being this is exactly what he's done to her for nigh twenty years now, he's exacted his intended revenge to perfection). Despite her total awareness of what this had potentially become, he still had the power to make her fall for it. She’d given him all the devices in terms of information he was ever going to need; he was already employing those elements. After encountering him in 1999 she perceived the interaction in no other way than as this potential trap, one she’d already rejected by virtue of her choice to have this all concluded by choosing one person out of the universal and having asked him in her mind to be with him in the real world. Since that prospect really potentially existed thanks to Billy’s bigger-than-the-universe response, her heart was loyal only to that existing prospect; she was safely sequestered inside the fact that she really had found herself in someone else, was safely sequestered inside the devotion of her own love, just as she had, in the same token, safely sequestered him in his own vows when she met him. Bono could not actually engage her, except within the parameters she herself had provided in terms of the transcendent spiritual connection; she’d effectively put bounds on the nature of his seduction. (Explains what he was feeling around “Million Dollar Hotel”, doesn’t it?) She eluded him still, despite the fact that his declared revenge was taken to its ultimate aptitude by freezing what she’d informed him of in amber, in a song called “Wild Honey”.