Still Partly Awake

Lyrics

[Intro]
(everything very far away now)
Here it is. This is the part with no edge on it.

[Verse 1]
A minute ago you were thinking about the car, or the email,
or the thing you should have said in nineteen ninety-eight,
and the thoughts were yours, in sentences, in your own voice,
and you were the one having them, and you knew that you were.
And now there is a corridor, and it has always been there,
and you are in it, and it is completely reasonable that you are.

[Chorus]
Still partly awake. That's the whole trick of it —
you have not gone under, you are watching yourself go under,
the images have arrived and taken over the machinery
and some small part of you is still standing at the back, observing.
Still partly awake. It lasts about a minute.
Nobody has ever felt the exact moment it ends.

[Verse 2]
That's what I find remarkable, and I'll say it and then leave you:
you will fall asleep tonight, and you have every night,
some twenty-five thousand times if you have been here a while,
and you have never once experienced the transition.
Not once. Not ever. Nobody has. It cannot be done.
The door only closes when there's nobody left to see it.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
So all of this — the lights, the voice, the falling, the faces,
the rocking bed, the stranger standing patiently by the door —
all of it is the sound of a building closing for the night,
the lights going off in a sequence, department by department,
and somebody still on the third floor, filing, in the dark,
who does not know the doors are locked and will not know.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(almost nothing)
Nearly.
Nearly.
There.