Verse 1 Learning to count the empty rooms Left by the memories of your name Dirt on the windows like a map Places where we used to stand Midnight keeps the ledger of promises that came and went I trace the margins of your photograph until the paper understands Pre-Chorus There’s language in the silence that keeps folding me in two Calendars of small betrayals where every date remembers you Chorus The grief lasts a lifetime, it wears the shape of every year It hides inside the laughter and it answers when I hear The time that keeps on turning An open wound that will not close The grief lasts a lifetime, and still I learn to hold it close Verse 2 Unfinished sentences like an anchor inside my coat The chains rattle when I walk through Rooms that grips me by the throat Streetlights stitch the skyline with the thread of what we lost I bargain with the moonlight for the warmth that came at such a cost Pre-Chorus Memory is a stubborn tide that lifts me up and pulls me under I listen for your footsteps in the thunder All you left has been torn asunder Chorus The grief lasts a lifetime, it finds me in the smallest things A coffee cup, a song, the way the winter always brings A hollow where the sunlight used to lay its gentle hand The grief lasts a lifetime, and still I try to stand Bridge Sometimes I wear your absence like a coat too thin for winter Sometimes I build a fortress out of letters I will never send I speak to ghosts in doorways, bargain with the air for mercy But mercy is a distant country and I am always late to enter Verse 3 There are anniversaries that bloom like bruises on the skin I learn the names of new beginnings while the old ones ache within Children laugh in playgrounds where our shadows used to meet I fold my grief into a lullaby and hum it to the street Breakdown Not every day is heavy, some days are only gray Not every night is endless, some nights simply stay But under every sunrise there is a quiet undertow A current that remembers everything I try to let go Chorus Variation The grief lasts a lifetime, it teaches me the cost of love It carves a map of tenderness and leaves me tracing where you were It is a stubborn teacher, patient, cruel, and kind The grief lasts a lifetime, and in its lessons I am lined Coda So I keep a little altar of the ordinary and the true A chipped cup, a folded note, the echo of your shoe I do not ask for healing as if it were a single light I learn to live with shadows, and to carry them like light Final Refrain The grief lasts a lifetime, but so does what we gave It lives inside the living and it teaches how to brave The days that come with empty hands and pockets full of time The grief lasts a lifetime, and so does what was mine.

The Grief Lasts A Lifetime