It just does. They do. As creative and re-born we want to believe we are, cliches happen. Affairs start with a meeting at a hotel room.
Unrequited love have the option of leaving someone out in the rain who's stopped caring how wet he gets. Someone will always get
candy and flowers, or have a song or poem written about them. People will regret. They will pine and
keep the home fires burning.
They are the unattractive parts of us, the pieces of us that are regrettably just like everyone else. They are among the many things that painfully or with embarrassment, remind us that we are hopelessly tied to, and often only to, other humans, who are just as much at a loss about how to move past things as we are.
So, emotionally at least, we return to stock ideas that will always work. Or, perhaps, cliches return to us, once we've exhausted all the other ways to express things and none of them work. Waving goodbye from a train window works. Driving away into the sunset works. Scribbling into journals works. Crying in front of a box of photos or letters works too.
And, as it is, we need them to work. We need something within us to work its way out, whatever way that will work, just like we know that a Phillips head screwdriver will get out a screw with an X on its head. Some things in the human heart, while being tangled and frayed in their condition, can come out through cliches. So that, I believe, is how they survive us, like epitaphs of loss.