# Enter Prize [Verse 1] Do you ever have a day that doesn’t feel completely real? I’m holding one test print like proof that I exist, like paper could explain the way a turning point can feel. My job is the last job this old machine will ever run. They’re closing down at five, but he’ll stay until it’s done. His final sheet of paper, my first official one. [Pre-Chorus] Three designers, maybe four, passed the torch from hand to hand. I kept chasing every piece before the hourglass ran out of sand. [Chorus] Enter prize, pay the price to step inside. One enterprise is ending while another comes alive. Feed my dream through your machinery, let the old world print the new in me. Enter prize— I arrived on the last day of somebody else’s life. [Verse 2] I drove to Grandma’s house to borrow three hundred fifty dollars. I already owed my grandpa, so the asking felt much taller. He put five hundred in my hand and gave my fear a little buffer. Sixty-five for the woman who helped the whole thing move— she got a parking ticket while she was helping me come through. I said, “I’ll pay the consequence. Just let me make this true.” [Pre-Chorus] Everybody carried something: money, edits, ink, or time. Maybe roots don’t always show us how they keep a tree alive. [Chorus] Enter prize, pay the price to step inside. One enterprise is ending while another comes alive. Feed my dream through your machinery, let the old world print the new in me. Enter prize— I arrived on the last day of somebody else’s life. [Verse 3] Then my mother handed me a letter waiting in the mail. Seventeen hundred dollars for the van that disappeared. I named the van Adventure. It was stolen twice before. The second time by Story— tell me, what’s a metaphor for? A branch came down and broke the roof. My bag was taken too. My cat was dying. Home was poison. My name was bruised. Everything I owned kept slipping out of view. Still I kept insisting there was something I could do. [Breakdown] Adventure stolen by Story. Story stolen from me. A collections letter asking what was left to seize. No savings. No assets. No paycheck they could see. Only fifty printed invitations to believe in what could be. [Chorus] Enter prize, pay the price to step inside. One enterprise is ending while another comes alive. Feed my grief through your machinery, let the pressure print a purpose out of me. Enter prize— I survived every toll they placed between me and my life. [Bridge] I said, “I’m playing Legendary Life Mode. I consent to the frustration. I have survived much worse than this. Today is still a good day.” Not because the debt was gone. Not because the world was kind. But because somebody stayed late, and somebody gave me time. I wanted one thousand people solving one thousand things— not waiting for one distant hero to descend and pull the strings. For the people. By the people. Grassroots underneath. A thirty-year-old vision trying hard to learn to breathe. [Final Chorus] Enter prize, there is no clean way inside. Every enterprise is borrowed— every future, ink and time. One tree falls. One seed opens. One hand pays. One hand writes. One business locked its doors that evening. I walked out carrying fifty lights. Enter prize— not success, not some guarantee I’d win. Just the cost of choosing meaning when the walls were closing in. Enter prize. Enter grief. Enter debt and grand belief. Their ending pressed against my beginning and printed both of them on me. [Outro] Do you ever have a day that doesn’t feel completely real? I have proof. A test print. The last job through their press. The first page of whatever happened next.
