Someone Says Your Name

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a room, empty, and one word spoken just too quietly to place)
Clear as anything. Right there in the room.

[Verse 1]
Not a noise you interpreted. Not a pipe, not the house settling.
A voice. An actual voice. Saying the actual thing —
your name, the whole of it, the way one person says it,
at conversational volume, about four feet from your head.
And you are awake instantly and the room is completely empty
and the silence afterwards is louder than the word.

[Chorus]
Someone says your name. It is the commonest one there is.
Ask any room of people and a third of them go quiet.
It's your own voice, most likely — your own, played back to you
from the part that makes the voices, with nobody at the wheel.
Someone says your name. There is nobody there.
And you knew that, and you still sat up.

[Verse 2]
It's usually your first name only. Rarely the surname too.
Sometimes it's your mother. Sometimes somebody dead.
And it is never a sentence, never a phrase, never a warning —
just the name, said plainly, the way you'd say it to get attention.
Which is the eerie part, if we're honest about it:
somebody wanted your attention, and the somebody was you.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
The clinical word for this is hypnagogic hallucination
and the clinical word does nothing, does not help at all,
because the experience is not clinical, the experience is
being called, in the dark, by someone who is not there,
and lying very still afterwards, listening hard,
in case it happens again. It rarely happens again.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(silence, held a beat too long)
You answered.
Under your breath. You actually answered.