Mount Eerie - Soria Moria lyrics

Slow pulsing red tower lights
Across a distance refuge in the dust

All my life I can remember longing
Looking across the water and seeing lights
When I was five or six
We were camping in the islands in July
The tall yellow grass and the
Rose hips fragrant after sunset
Island beyond island undulating and familiar
Not far from home
With my fragrant, whittled
Cedar driftwood dagger in the
Mildew canvas tent
I saw fireworks many miles away
But didn't hear them
And I felt a longing, a childish melancholy
And then I went to sleep
And the aching was buried, dreaming, aging
Reaching for an idea of somewhere
Other than this place that
Could fold me in clouded yearning
For nowhere actually reachable
The distance was the point
And then when I was twenty-four
I followed this ache to
An arctic Norwegian cabin
Where I said "fuck the world"
In a finally satisfying way
I stayed through the winter and
Emerged as an adult
Holding a letter from you, an invitation
So I flew back and drove back
And when we met in person it was instant
It didn't matter where we lived as
Long as we were together
And that was really true for thirteen years
And the whole time still

Slow pulsing red tower lights
Across a distance refuge in the dust

In January, you were alive still but
Chemo had ravaged and
Transformed your porcelain into
Some other thing
Something jaundiced and fucked
They put you in the hospital in Everett
So I gave the baby away
And drove up and down I5 every night like
A satellite bringing you food that you wanted
Returning at night to sleep in our bed, cold
I went back to feel alone there
All past selves and future
Possibilities on hold while
I tore through the dark on the freeway
The old yearning burning in me
I knew exactly where the road bent around
Where the trees opened up and I could see
Way above the horizon
Beyond innumerable islands
The towers on top of the
Mountain lit up slowly
Silently beaconing as if to say:
"Just keep going
There is a place where a wind
Could erase this for you
And the branches could white
Noise you back awake"
So I went back to feel alone
There but cradled you in me
In the National Gallery in Oslo there's
A painting called Soria Moria
A kid looks across a deep canyon of fog
At a lit-up inhuman castle or something

I have not stopped looking across
The water from the
Few difficult spots where you can see that
The distance from this haunted
House where I live
To Soria Moria is a real traversable space
I'm an arrow now midair

Slow pulsing red tower lights
Across a distance refuge in the dust