Climbing Toward What You Fear to Lose

Lyrics

[Intro]
Found this on Summa Ri.
Where no one has ever been.
Tucked in a cairn of shale.
A little waterproof bag.

[Verse 1]
Fiona. Fear of Heights Fiona, they called you.
A private joke you had to live with.
Three hundred feet up a Texas turbine, 03:17 in January.
The whole tower humming at 0.8 hertz, a slow pulse against your ribs.
Your harness smelling of machine oil and the cold sweat of looking down.
You climbed into that hot nacelle, sixty degrees Celsius inside while the plains froze.
A private heat against a public fear.

[Chorus]
This little book in my hands tells of a different climb.
A chart of rising temperatures.
A map of hope measured in tenths of a degree.
Why do we climb toward the very thing we're most afraid to lose?
Why carry the fragile proof so high?

[Verse 2]
Page after page.
Blue ink. Basal body temperature.
Ovulation predictor kits.
Little plus signs circled in hope.
Negative space for the lines that never appeared.
All the clinical words for the most animal wanting.
You managed the grid's energy by day...
and charted your own body's precarious grid by night.

[Chorus]
This little book in my hands, it's a different climb.
A chart of rising temperatures.
A map of hope measured in tenths of a degree.
Why do we climb toward the very thing we're most afraid to lose?
Why carry the fragile proof so high, where the air is too thin to cry?

[Bridge]
Did the air on that Karakoram ridge taste like the steel ladder on the plains?
Metallic and thin?
Did you hear the same wind, just colder, singing the same song?
You left the charts here, Fiona.
You left the calendar of wanting.
On a peak with no name but its height.
A summit that has never been reached.

[Outro]
Just the record of the trying.
Left at the highest point of failure.
Or was it faith?
The question just... hangs here.