NIEMCY: The Weather Station - Thirty

"For women, 30 is the number you’re taught to fear. When you’re 25, you picture it like falling off the edge of a cliff, into some amorphous bisected destiny – one path children, suburbia, the other some sort of cartoonish loneliness. I was 30. My parents had just gotten divorced, my friends were having kids, and I was touring Europe in a station wagon. And I was incredibly happy. Losing my mind over Swedish rest stops and laughing in parking lots with my friends. I wrote the song about that precise moment – joy balanced on the cusp of despair.”

[Verse 1]
There was a time
When you put your hand on the small of my back
I was surprised that you touched me like that
But there in your hand was a current of life
I could hardly stand
I stayed still
And I didn't mention it
Or if I did, I made some joke of it
It was strange how I could feel so sane
So plain when you're around

[Verse 2]
And unbidden to me
There it rose, the fantasy
Colored rose and easy
Yeah, I could see it so simple, unsubtle
Impossible, clearly
And strange
Far and as close as a mountain range
On the horizon driving all day
There I was, so sane
So plain after everything

[Verse 3]
Gas came down
From a buck-twenty
The joke was how
It broke the economy anyhow
The dollar was down
But my friends opened businesses
There were new children
And again, I didn't get married
I wasn't close to my family
And my dad was raising a child in Nairobi
She was three now, he told me

[Verse 4]
Gas stations I laughed in
I noticed fucking everything
The light, the reflections
Different languages, your expressions
We would fall down laughing
Effervescent
And all over nothing, all over nothing

Just as though
It was a joke my whole life through
All of the pain and sorrow I knew
All of the tears that had fallen from my eyes
I can't say why
We walked in the park
Under the shade
I avoided your eyes
I was ashamed of my own mind
No SSRIs
My day is dark as your night

[Verse 5]
Oh, you got
The kindest of eyes
I cannot help but notice sometimes
But you know, as do I
I cannot look twice without falling right
Into the sweet and the tender line between
Something I can and can never be
And just then an ambulance
Passed on the street
And you took my arm reflexively

[Refrain]
That was the year I was thirty
That was the year you were thirty-one
That was the year that we lost, or we won

That was the year I was thirty
That was the year you were thirty-one
That was that year, now here
Now here is another one