?Interrobang! · Track 11 · middle
The Other Life
OBJECT (intimate, what Sisukiro found): a 'what if' alternate-life-path journal. OWNER (re-linked by Sisukiro): Early Bird Eddie — night worm-picker from the Great Lakes; note the irony of the name. FOUND AT: the endless Siberian taiga. THE (UN)LIKELY STORY & THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION: Eddie works the worms by night though he's the Early Bird; left his roads-not-taken journal in the endless taiga. Which life were you supposed to live?
Lyrics
[Intro] Found this under silver birch, half-frozen to the earth. A leather book. The spine, worn smooth. No name. Just the press of a thousand nights. [Verse 1] Early Bird Eddie, that was your joke, wasn't it? 2 a.m. by Lake Michigan, the air thick with damp soil. A red-filtered headlamp painting the wet grass. Your whole world in that soft, crimson arc. Gooseflesh on your arms in the July cool. The soft rustle of a nightcrawler surfacing. The scrape of a tin can filling in the dark. [Chorus] But in these pages, you were a cartographer. In these pages, you learned to fly a plane in 1952. Every entry, a life you didn't choose. A different road, a different pair of shoes. This book of ghosts you left in the Siberian taiga... Eddie, which life were you supposed to live? [Verse 2] On page seventeen, you ran a hotel in Lisbon. You knew the name of every guest, every stray cat. On page eighty-one, you were a doctor in a town with no name, setting a bone by lantern light. You had a wife. You had a son. You wrote down the arguments you would have won. Every life but this one. [Chorus] Because in these pages, you were a cartographer. In these pages, you learned to fly a plane in 1952. Every entry, a life you didn't choose. A different road, a different pair of shoes. This book of ghosts you left in the Siberian taiga... Eddie, which life were you supposed to live? [Bridge] Did you carry all these other men across the sea? All the Eddies who never had to bend to the wet earth? Did you bring them here to the endless trees just to give their ghosts a final birth, and then a death? Was this forest finally big enough to hold the weight of every story you left untold? [Outro] The red light on the lawn. The smell of lake water before the dawn. And the question, hanging in the cold. Which one... was yours... to hold?