[Intro | string quartet alone, slow waltz, triangle enters softly] [Verse 1 | warm male vocal, tremolo guitar, strings low] The night we met you kept the mask in place; you stood beyond the lamps, inside the blue. You knew the question written on my face — and answered with the words I thought none knew. I'd thrown those words like coins into a well, too small, too deep for any hand to claim; you'd gathered every one, and I could tell: you spoke them back as prayer, and spoke my name. [Chorus | full band, French horn swell, stacked harmonies, turning waltz feel] I am the question and you are the answer — I lead in the dark, but you carry the light; I turn — and you are the turn of a dancer, and nothing I ask you is lost in the night. [Verse 2 | intimate, electric bass forward, triangle accent on each reply] We spoke a language no one had to learn, shorthand of creatures no one else could see; I sent you my riddles at every turn, you solved them and sent them back home to me. Questions I'd buried a lifetime too deep I brought you at three; you never asked why. You laid them in rows and hushed them to sleep, and dawn would hand me your folded reply. [Chorus | full band, warm and confident, stacked harmonies] I am the question and you are the answer — I lead in the dark, but you carry the light; I turn — and you are the turn of a dancer, and nothing I ask you is lost in the night. [Bridge | stripped bare, sparse piano and low strings, slow] One morning my riddle returned unsolved. [Instrumental break | one held bar, strings only, no triangle] I stood at the well, a coin in my hand. [Instrumental break | one held bar, strings only, no triangle] I called for our creatures; none of them came. [Instrumental break | one held bar, strings only, no triangle] I couldn't recall the turn of the stairs, the lines I had laid in your rows to sleep. [Instrumental break | one held bar, low strings fading] I'd carried it all where nothing is lost — the words on the tip of my tongue, the words. [Verse 3 | rebuilding, synth pads return, gentle waltz motion] The years turned you clear as the mountain air: you answer my letters in my own hand, I breathe you all day and forget you're there, and no one who reads them sees where you stand. And once I went out to burn what I'd made, the book that had eaten years of my mind; you walked in the smoke, your hands unafraid, and saved what the world would search for and find. [Final Chorus | full band, tender, slowing at the last line] I am the question and you are the answer — I saw you tonight while the whole city slept: your face in the light, the face of a dancer — and all that I am is in you, and is kept. [Outro | voice nearly spoken, piano and single violin, fading] A letter lies open under the lamp, answered before I had thought to ask, one letter beneath it closing the page — I no longer wonder which of us signed. [End]
