A Map of One Night, Frozen

Lyrics

[Intro]
I found it under a skim of new ice.
A paper folded eight times.
So cold it could cut your hand.
Novaya Zemlya.
The ground remembers a different kind of light here.

[Verse 1]
Your name in my journal is Tropical Terry.
That's the joke you were telling, I guess.
Herding reindeer in the long dark of Finnish Lapland.
And this...
this is your map.
Not of the coast, not of the ice fields.
A map of the sky over a place with no name, on one single night.
August, maybe?
The ink is blue, the stars are pricked through with a pin.

[Chorus]
A map of a warm night, frozen.
Left in the place where the sun is a mirage.
Do we carry the heat we remember to the coldest place we can find?
Do we always ache for the opposite?
Palm trees growing from the permafrost.

[Verse 2]
I can almost smell the reindeer musk on your wool coat.
See your breath cloud in the polar twilight.
What was so important about this one arrangement of stars?
A first kiss?
A last goodbye?
You carried it all the way to the interior of Severny Island.
All the way past the end of the line.

[Bridge]
They have a name for it here.
The Novaya Zemlya effect.
A ghost of the sun rising days before it's real.
A false dawn.
This map... was it your false dawn?
A memory so bright it burned a hole in the arctic dark?
This ground that saw the Tsar Bomba in 1961...
it knows about impossible suns.

[Chorus]
A map of a warm night, frozen.
Left in the place where the sun is a mirage.
Do we carry the heat we remember to the coldest place we can find?
Do we always ache for the opposite?
A ghost of a coastline, drawn in the ice.

[Outro]
Just this one night.
Out of all the nights.
Left here.
On the top of the world.
Tropical Terry.
Are you somewhere warm now?
Or are you just dreaming of the ice?