[Intro — soft piano, distant thunder, faint footsteps in a hallway] Today’s your birthday… People will probably call you. Tell you they love you. Tell you what a good man you became. Maybe somebody puts candles on a cake and everybody smiles for a picture. But candles don’t erase memories. Birthdays don’t rewrite history. And getting older doesn’t make you innocent. Because somewhere underneath the man I became… there’s still a little boy trying to understand why the people who were supposed to love him… hurt him the most. [Verse 1] I was just a little boy learning love through pain, Moving house to house while strangers changed my name, Every man who played my father brought another kind of rain, Every hand that should’ve held me somehow tightened up the chain. I learned footsteps in the hallway meant somebody came insane, Learned the sound a door makes right before somebody brings the pain, Learned to disappear inside myself and never once complain, ’Cause crying only gave somebody one more reason to explain— That I deserved the anger, That somehow I was to blame, So I buried half my childhood Somewhere deep inside my brain. Now I barely know the memories, But my body knows their stain, And that frightened little boy Still wakes up screaming in my veins. [Pre-Chorus] People say… “That was a long time ago.” Like years are some kind of medicine. Like growing older means growing out of it. But time didn’t heal everything. Time just taught me how to smile while carrying things I never learned how to put down. [Chorus] So you don’t get my happy birthday, You don’t get those words from me. You don’t get to blow out candles while I’m still putting out fires you couldn’t see. You don’t get to call it childhood when I called it trying to breathe. You got to walk away from everything— I had to grow up underneath. You left your fingerprints on wounds that followed me into my life. Into every room I ever entered, every time I feared a fight. You got another birthday. I got another year surviving what you did. So the only gift you’ll ever get from me… Is knowing you couldn’t kill that kid. [Verse 2] I spent half my childhood wondering why nothing felt right, Lying wide awake and staring through the darkness every night, Every shadow looked like danger, every silence felt like fight, Every grown man saying “trust me” made me want to take my flight. I was angry, I was anxious, I was always wound up tight, Depression learned my address before I knew how pain could write, I forgot entire chapters like my mind turned off the light, But forgetting doesn’t mean that what was buried lost its bite. I grew older throwing punches at a world I couldn’t fight, Trying desperately to prove that I was stronger than my fright, Everybody called me troubled, nobody asked me what ignites All the rage inside a little boy who never felt alright. So when people call me strong now, They don’t know the price I paid. They see the man who made it out, Not the child who stayed afraid. [Bridge] I won’t pretend it didn’t happen. I won’t dress it up as fate. I can name the rooms, the silence, I can name the hands that made me wait. But I am not your secret. I am not your borrowed shame. The boy you tried to bury learned to answer to his name. [Final Chorus] So you don’t get my happy birthday, You don’t get those words from me. You don’t get to light the candles while I’m still learning how to breathe. You don’t get to call it childhood when I was fighting to be free. You got to walk away from everything— But you don’t get the rest of me. You left your fingerprints on wounds, but they don’t define my life. I can enter every room now without preparing for a fight. You get another birthday. I get another year alive. So the only gift you’ll ever get from me… Is knowing that kid survived. [Outro] Today’s your birthday… And somewhere underneath the man I became… there’s still a little boy. But he isn’t waiting for you anymore.
