What Are We Waiting For

Lyrics

They called you Impatient Ian.
I found your logbook.
Two thousand yen an hour to stand in line for concert tickets in Shibuya.
Five thousand for a new phone release in Ginza.
You measured your life in the patience you sold to others.
Hours on the pavement, staring at the back of someone's head.
Thinking of here.
Thinking of the dark.

And for every day spent waiting for something you didn't want,
you wrote a wish for something you did.
Folded it small, pushed it into the glass.
This jar, heavy with years.
Tell me, Ian.
After all that time,
what are we waiting for?

It took three days to get down here.
Three days of rope and darkness and the smell of wet limestone.
Three degrees Celsius, always.
The drip at six hundred meters... every eleven seconds.
You, the man who couldn't wait,
you chose the slowest place on Earth to leave your hurry.
Left the Tokyo hustle for the geological quiet.

And for every day spent waiting for something you didn't want,
you wrote a wish for something you did.
Folded it small, pushed it into the glass.
This jar, heavy with years.
Tell me, Ian.
After all that time,
what are we waiting for?

Each folded square is a grain of sand.
A tiny irritation. A desperate hope.
Did you think the pressure down here, the patient dark,
would turn them into cave pearls?
Something smooth and perfect, formed around a wound.
A wish from 1998.
A name from 2017.
I won't unfold them. They're not mine.
They're just yours. Waiting.

What are we waiting for?
Is it coming?
Or is this it?
Just the waiting.