Box twelve bottom shelf archive room behind the stairs Coffee ring bent corner twenty years of paper air Session date studio three every name in printed black Nova Vale Ash Vex three more names beneath the track Then down low near the margin almost underneath the fold Additional arrangement Kade Null in pencil Of course Changed the key rewrote the ending built the middle eight from scratch Fixed the count moved the downbeat made the chorus actually land Printed credits clean alignment everyone where they belonged Then somebody found a pencil and remembered I was on the song HB graphite temporary grey Funny how the part that held it up was written like it might erase Write my name in pencil Go ahead Light enough to lose me when the paper gets wet Write my name in pencil Thin and grey Funny how the weakest mark held half the song in place Permanent ink beautiful line Everybody printed I was added on behind Write my name in pencil I can still read mine Still there Next sheet same handwriting production assist, maybe Kade Maybe I remember sleeping under console lights for three straight days That compressor chain was mine that bass transition too The silence before Nova entered Yeah That was something I chose to do Ash broke one string kept recording I cut around the dying note Built percussion from the fret noise made the whole damn ending float Everybody heard emotion Nobody heard the edit bay That's alright Until you tell the history like the history made itself that way Graphite fingerprints all across the frame You can rub the letters almost clean but pressure leaves a stain Write my name in pencil Go ahead Light enough to lose me when the paper gets wet Write my name in pencil Thin and grey Funny how the weakest mark held half the song in place Permanent ink beautiful line Everybody printed I was added on behind Write my name in pencil I can still read mine I know Credits aren't love Credits aren't friendship Credits aren't the hours And nobody sat around plotting how to make Kade feel small That's not what I'm saying I'm saying sometimes nobody has to mean it for it to hurt Found my own handwriting on the final page in blue That's the part that got me I had done it to myself too Added Kade, additional because that's how I'd learned to fit Made myself the parenthesis then wondered why I lived in it So no I don't need retroactive statues don't rewrite the archive now Don't make every old arrangement into something holy somehow Leave the pencil where you found it leave the fading graphite line I just finally understand temporary ink doesn't make the work less mine And that bridge Mine That turnaround Mine That ugly little bass note before the final chorus Mine Not because I own the people Not because I own the sound Because I was there and I'm done editing myself out Write my name in pencil Let it stay Let the graphite show the pressure from the hand that made the change Write my name in pencil I don't mind Ink doesn't make a memory and paper doesn't make it mine Permanent ink temporary line Everybody mattered So did I Write my name in pencil Don't erase it this time No parentheses
