The Grief Lasts A Lifetime

Verse 1

Learning to count the empty rooms

Left by the memories of your name

Dirt on the windows like a map

Places where we used to stand

Midnight keeps the ledger of

promises that came and went

I trace the margins of your photograph until the paper understands

Pre-Chorus

There’s language in the silence

that keeps folding me in two

Calendars of small betrayals where every date remembers you

Chorus

The grief lasts a lifetime, it wears the shape of every year

It hides inside the laughter and it answers when I hear

The time that keeps on turning

An open wound that will not close

The grief lasts a lifetime, and still I learn to hold it close

Verse 2

Unfinished sentences like an anchor inside my coat

The chains rattle when I walk through Rooms that grips me by the throat

Streetlights stitch the skyline with the thread of what we lost

I bargain with the moonlight for the warmth that came at such a cost

Pre-Chorus

Memory is a stubborn tide

that lifts me up and pulls me under

I listen for your footsteps in the thunder

All you left has been torn asunder

Chorus

The grief lasts a lifetime, it finds me in the smallest things

A coffee cup, a song, the way the winter always brings

A hollow where the sunlight used to lay its gentle hand

The grief lasts a lifetime, and still I try to stand

Bridge

Sometimes I wear your absence like a coat too thin for winter

Sometimes I build a fortress out of letters I will never send

I speak to ghosts in doorways, bargain with the air for mercy

But mercy is a distant country and I am always late to enter

Verse 3

There are anniversaries that bloom like bruises on the skin

I learn the names of new beginnings while the old ones ache within

Children laugh in playgrounds where our shadows used to meet

I fold my grief into a lullaby and hum it to the street

Breakdown

Not every day is heavy, some days are only gray

Not every night is endless, some nights simply stay

But under every sunrise there is a quiet undertow

A current that remembers everything I try to let go

Chorus Variation

The grief lasts a lifetime, it teaches me the cost of love

It carves a map of tenderness and leaves me tracing where you were

It is a stubborn teacher, patient, cruel, and kind

The grief lasts a lifetime, and in its lessons I am lined

Coda

So I keep a little altar of the ordinary and the true

A chipped cup, a folded note, the echo of your shoe

I do not ask for healing as if it were a single light

I learn to live with shadows, and to carry them like light

Final Refrain

The grief lasts a lifetime, but so does what we gave

It lives inside the living and it teaches how to brave

The days that come with empty hands and pockets full of time

The grief lasts a lifetime, and so does what was mine.