Someone Is Standing There

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a floorboard, or maybe not a floorboard)
By the door. On the left. You know exactly where.

[Verse 1]
You didn't see anything. Let's be accurate about this.
You are not reporting a figure. There is no figure to report.
What you have is the certainty — flat, total, unarguable —
that the room contains one more person than it did,
and that they are standing over there, and have been for a while,
and are not doing anything. That's the part. They're just there.

[Chorus]
Someone is standing there. The felt presence. It has a name.
It is the oldest thing we report and the hardest to describe,
because there is nothing to describe — no shape, no face, no sound,
just occupancy, just the fact of a room being shared.
Someone is standing there. Turn the light on. Nobody.
Turn it off. They're back. That's the maddening part.

[Verse 2]
They have found it in a lab, which I think is remarkable —
stimulate one spot in the parietal, and the subject reports
a person behind them, mirroring them, standing close,
and the person is not there, and the subject knows this, and reports it anyway.
So it is a place. There is a place in the head for this.
A dedicated seat, kept ready, for somebody who never comes.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And I don't think it's frightening once you know that, honestly.
It's a system that watches for other bodies near your own,
running with no input, in the dark, on a low setting,
and returning a false positive, the way any system does.
Somebody is always nearly there. That is the resting state.
That is what it feels like to be an animal that lives in groups.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the floorboard again, and nothing after it)
Still there.
Still nobody. Still there.