Verse 1

We were told to gather what we could carry

and leave before the walls forgot our names.

The water in the valley keeps receding —

the reactor cools itself on what remains.

Two hundred fifty days and still no harbor,

the hull grows tight with everything unsaid.

We count the fractures in the window framing

and ask whose name belongs above the dead.

Chorus

The heat is not a metaphor this summer,

it bends the river, cracks the cooling stone.

A Friday should feel different from a Monday —

but every weight we've held has followed home.

We read the verdicts like we read the weather:

probable, delayed, arriving wrong.

The prize says victory is no one's language.

We already knew — we wrote that in our song.

Bridge

Somewhere a foghorn wakes a sleeping creature

just to prove that someone has the nerve.

Somewhere a settlement becomes a number,

and grief is parsed to what the courts deserve.

We are not cynics — we just know the schedule,

the way that justice comes in its own time,

the way a summer Friday holds its tension

between collapse and something close to fine.

Outro

The river drops its level.

The window holds the frame.

We press our hands to what remains.

Instrumental Outro

How did it make you feel?

A new song arrives tomorrow.