[Intro (Sound of a single pencil scratching on paper, a slow, ticking hi-hat, the faint, persistent hum of an old fluorescent light. A detuned guitar chord hangs in the air, unresolved.)] [Verse 1] It's 8:17 PM. Room 214 is dark. Grading your carbon dating lab reports. You confused the half-life of Uranium-238 With the half-life of this... whatever this was. Four and a half billion years to turn to lead. We managed it in six, you said. The graph should be a clean curve, exponential decay. Not this... scatterplot of "we'll be okay." [Pre-Chorus (A simple, sad melodic guitar line emerges, playing a hesitant riff.)] And I'm calculating the constant The rate of our slow disintegration Every year, the dose halves again But the background radiation remains [Chorus (The music builds slightly with a soft, melodic bass line and the ticking hi-hat becomes more pronounced. The singing is weary, almost a sigh.)] We're measuring our love in half-lives Counting down the silent goodbyes The atoms we started with are half gone But the decay is still going on And stable? No, just... less unstable [Verse 2] You left your coffee mug here, "World's Best Geologist." The irony's not lost on me, a real scientist Would have measured the thermal loss, the rate of cooling Seen the end coming from the start, no need for fooling. Now I'm calibrating the spectrometer alone Thinking of the isotopes we used to own. How a million years is just a blip on the chart But a single Saturday can break a heart. [Bridge (The music strips back to just the ticking hi-hat and a whisper. The guitar is gone.)] The lab manual says it's a random process. There's no anger in it, no malice. Just probability. A quiet, inevitable fade. A decision that some atoms simply... made. To let go. To become something else. To forget the structure of their former selves. [Outro (The pencil stops scratching. A chair squeaks. The melodic guitar returns for one last, lonely phrase. The ticking hi-hat continues, fading slowly.)] The half-life of the memory of your laugh... The half-life of the photograph... The half-life of the hope I had... ...is longer than I planned. [Coda (The final sound is the click of a light switch, a moment of pure silence, and then the distant, hollow ring of a janitor's keys echoing down the hallway. The geiger-counter hi-hat ticks once more and cuts out.)]
