Mount Eerie - Distortion lyrics

But, I don't believe in ghosts or anything
I know that you are gone and that
I'm carrying some version of you around
Some untrustworthy old description
In my memories
And that must be your ghost taking form
Created every moment by me dreaming you so
And is it my job now to
Hold whatever's left of you
For all time? And to re-enact
You for our daughter's life?

I do remember when I was a kid and
Realized that life ends and is just
Over that a point comes where we no
Longer get to say or do anything
And then what? I guess just forgotten
And I said to my mom that I hoped
To do something important with my life
Not be famous, but just
Remembered a little more
To echo beyond my actual end
And my mom laughed at this kid trying
To wriggle his way out of mortality
Of the final inescapable feral scream
But, I held that hope and grew
Up wondering what dying means
Unsatisfied, ambitious and squirming

The first dead body I ever saw in real life
Was my great-grandfather's
Embalmed in a casket in Everett
In a room by the freeway
Where they talked me into reading
A thing from the Bible
About walking through a valley in
The shadow of death
But, I didn't understand the words
I thought of
Actually walking through a valley
In a shadow, with a backpack and a tent
But that dead body next to
Me spoke clear and metaphor-free

In December 2001 after having
Spent the summer
And fall traveling mostly alone around
The country that was spiraling
Into war and mania
Little flags were everywhere
I was living on the
Periphery as a twenty-three-year-old
Wrapped up in doing what I wanted
And it was music and painting on newsprint
And eating all the fruit from the tree like
Tarzan, or Walt Whitman
Voracious, devouring life, singing my songs
Sleeping in yards without asking permission

But that December I was shaken
By a pregnancy scare
From someone that I'd been with for
Only one night, many states away
Who I hadn't planned to keep knowing
A young and embarrassing
Over-confident animal night
And the terror of the idea of
Fatherhood at twenty-three destroyed
My foundation, and left me freaked out
And wandering around mourning
The independence and solitude that
Defined me then

Though my life is a galaxy of subtleties
My complex intentions and aspirations do
Not matter at all
In the face of the crushing
Flow of actual time
I saw my ancestors as sad and
Misunderstood in the same way
That my descendants will squint back through
A fog trying to see
Some polluted version of all I
Meant to be in life
Their recollections pruned by
The accidents of time, what got thrown away
And what gets talked about at night
But she had her period eventually and
I went back to being twenty-three

Eleven years later I was
Traveling alone again on
An airplane from New Zealand to Perth
Western Australia very alone
So far away from you and the
Home that we had made
I watched a movie on the
Plane about Jack Kerouac
A documentary going deeper than
The usual congratulations
They interviewed his daughter, Jan Kerouac
And she tore through the history
She told about this deadbeat drinking
Watching Three Stooges on TV
Not acknowledging his paternity
Abandoning the child
Taking cowardly refuge in his self-mythology

And when she spoke I heard your voice
Telling me about the adults who
Had abandoned you as a sweet kid
And left you to grow precariously
And when she spoke I looked in her face
And saw you looking back at me
On a tiny airplane seat screen at
The bottom of the world
I saw a French-Canadian resemblance
And I heard suffering echoing
A lineage of bad parents
And strong daughters withstanding
And she had black hair and freckles
And pale skin just like you
And she told the hard truth and
Slayed the gods just like you
I saw the cracks in the façade of posterity
I missed you so I went home

The second dead body I ever saw was you
Geneviève
When I watched you turn from alive to dead
Right here in our house
And I looked around the room
And asked "Are you
Here?", and you weren't, and
You are not here, i sing to you though
I keep you breathing through my
Lungs in a constant
Uncomfortable stream of memories trailing out
Until I am dead too
And then eventually the people who
Remember me will also die
Containing what it was like to stand
In the same air with me
And breathe and wonder why

And then distortion
And then the silence of space
The Night Palace the ocean blurring
But in my tears right now light gleams