From the 7GS album: “Eightfold (The Witnessforms)” 💿 Lyrics: There are things the body remembers before the mouth knows their names. A chair. A hallway. A voice from another room. The sound of somebody coming home. My grandmother was an anchor, my rock beneath the floor. Then one day the ground kept turning and she wasn’t holding anymore. I remember being rootless, walking round with foreign eyes, poor aim where there once was north, learning grief has different tides. She said she wanted to clean next summer. I believed there would be a next. October held a sentence quietly: “You allowed me my independence.” I didn’t know a goodbye could hide inside an ordinary day. What remains has weight. What remains has hands. A life can leave the room and still rearrange the plans. What remains is not a ghost, not proof that death stood still. It is love with nowhere physical to go and somewhere living that it will. Eric lives in smaller places: a song I hear, a thing I almost say, an unfinished sentence that refuses to decay. Calls. Shared routines. The mundane made holy because I know now how little time can look like when you’re standing inside it. After Grandma and Eric, something changed in me. Risk learned another language. Ease became harder to keep. There was a thought once: if I disappeared, would anybody know how much had gathered there? I won’t manufacture an answer. I won’t dress the old hurt up. I’ll keep the room, the weather, what happened afterward, and let the evidence speak enough. Because grief isn’t one clean feeling. It keeps slamming, washing over, like a cold ocean wave. And if memory is more than storage, if remembering is relationship, then losing touch is not the same as losing love. You were here. I witnessed you. I honor the passing. I let the road continue. I release you without ceasing to love you. What remains has weight. What remains has names. Grandmother. Eric. Childhood. Christmas. Driving through the dark. A voice on a recording I barely remember making. What remains has weight. So I will carry it plain. Not to keep the dead from leaving— to keep the love from being erased. You were here. I witnessed you. And that matters.
