Jamais Vu

Lyrics

[Intro]
(celeste — a single word played as a note, repeated, slowly losing its pitch)
(harp enters like a thought arriving sideways)
(heavy reverb on everything — the café is underwater, or remembered, or both)

[Verse 1]
I said the word table until the table left
Just the sound remained — a husk, a shed skin on the tongue
The temporal lobe fatigued the way a lightbulb fatigues
When you leave it on in a room that no one's entered since the war was young

Table table table table table
And now it's just a sound a horse might make
If the horse were trying to describe a feeling
It had about a lake

The café is still here but the word for it has gone
And without the word the thing itself gets nervous
The marble starts to wonder what it's for
The chairs forget they're in the service

[Pre-Chorus]
(strings enter — but slightly detuned, slightly wrong, the dream shifting)
This is jamais vu — the opposite of déjà
The familiar becoming foreign in your hands
Like picking up your keys and suddenly not knowing
What a key is — or a hand — or what anything demands

[Chorus]
(building — but the build keeps dissolving and restarting, like trying to climb stairs in a dream)
Jamais vu, jamais vu
I said love until love was just a sound
Jamais vu, jamais vu
I said home until home was just a mound
Of letters leaning on each other
In a language I invented by mistake
The neurons fired until the neurons tired
And the word fell through the floor of the lake

[Verse 2]
(voice and celeste only — intimate, close, the logic starting to drift)
The semantic network is a web of glass
And every word is held in place by every other word
But say one long enough and it detaches
Like a chandelier that realizes it's a bird

I said my name this morning in the mirror
And by the seventh repetition I was someone else
A woman with my face but no appointment
Standing in a bathroom full of someone else's shelves

I said Paris and Paris became a sound
Like paper being folded in a church
I said nervous and the system it referred to
Left the building with the quiet dignity of birch

[Pre-Chorus]
(the detuned strings return — the dream is fully lucid now)
This is semantic satiation — the clinical name
For the moment the label peels off the jar
And underneath is just the thing itself
Unlanguaged, uncontained, bizarre

And somehow more true
Than when it had a name

[Chorus]
(the build dissolves and reforms again — the dreaming staircase)
Jamais vu, jamais vu
I said love until love was just a sound
Jamais vu, jamais vu
I said home until home was just a mound
Of letters leaning on each other
In a language I invented by mistake
The neurons fired until the neurons tired
And the word fell through the floor of the lake

[Bridge]
(everything drops — just voice, a single harp note, and reverb. The deepest part of the dream.)
I went to the café this afternoon
And ordered something
But I had forgotten the word for what I wanted
So I described it instead

I said — I would like the dark liquid
That smells like the sound of someone
Deciding to stay awake
Against their own best interest

(pause)

And the waiter nodded
As if this were a perfectly normal thing to say
And brought me a cup of something
That I drank without knowing its name
And it was better that way

(long pause — just reverb breathing)

Because the word coffee
Is a small room
And the experience of coffee
Is a cathedral
And we have been living in the small room
So long
We forgot the cathedral was there

(strings enter — major key for the first time, warm, the dream becoming gentle)

The temporal lobe rested
The semantic web repaired itself
And the words came back one by one
Like guests returning to a party
They'd briefly left
To stand outside and look at the stars

And the stars didn't have names either
And they were fine with it

[Outro]
(the celeste returns — the same repeated note from the intro, but now it sounds different. Warmer. The word has come back changed.)
Jamais vu, jamais vu
(whispered, testing the word like stepping on ice)
Table
(pause)
Table
(pause — and the word holds)
Oh — there you are
(harp dissolves into silence — but a warm silence, a cathedral-sized silence)