The Love You're Given or the One You'd Choose

Lyrics

[Intro]
Foja Mountains. West Papua.
The air is metallic at 2,000 meters.
Everything drips.

[Verse 1]
In the damp leaf litter, something that doesn't belong.
Not a seed pod, not a beetle's wing.
A small black rectangle of plastic.
A tiny silver tooth that slides and clicks.
It holds a life I wasn't meant to see.
Your name, written in my recovered journal: Red Panda Rita.

[Verse 2]
But your hands are at the Chengdu Research Base.
Your days smell of sour-sweet formula and bamboo shoots.
You raise the giant cubs, separated from their mothers.
A nation's treasure, clumsy and monochrome.
The high-pitched bleats fill the nursery.
This is the job. This is the given thing.

[Chorus]
Do we love the thing we're given?
Or do we love the thing we'd choose?
The heavy, precious charge in your arms...
Or the flash of auburn fur you name yourself for?
Ailurus fulgens. The one true fire, on the other side of the glass.

[Verse 3]
I plugged it in. No pandas on this drive.
Just a bedroom, sunlight through the blinds.
A lover's hand on your bare shoulder.
Photos from a beach trip in 2005.
A face you wear when no one is watching the keeper.
The self you kept folded, small and warm, in a pocket.

[Bridge]
Did you bring this here to lose it?
On the expedition with Bruce Beehler?
Did you offer it to the cloud forest, a sacrifice?
Let the golden-mantled tree kangaroo stand guard?
Did you give your most private images to a place with no name, no roads?
A world unto itself, for a self you kept apart.

[Chorus]
Do we love the thing we're given?
Or do we love the thing we'd choose?
The helpless, iconic weight in your arms...
Or the lithe red phantom you dream of in the trees?
Ailurus fulgens. The beautiful, impossible one.

[Outro]
I'm holding the drive now.
It's warm from my hand.
Just data. Just a question.
Red Panda Rita.
Rita.