I Brought You a Rock (Puppy Love)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
I brought you a rock
From the playground
Near the fence
Where the good rocks live
And the rock
Was grey with a white line through it
And I thought
This is the most beautiful thing
I have ever found
And you are the most beautiful thing
I have ever found
And these two facts
Belong together
And I did not have the language
For why
I just had the rock
And the running
And the out-of-breath
Arrival at your desk
With my hand out
And the rock in it
And you said
Thank you
And put it in your pocket
And I have been in love
With the concept of pockets
Ever since

[Chorus]
L'amour chiot, l'amour chiot
The love that runs before it thinks
L'amour chiot, l'amour chiot
I brought you a rock
Because the rock was beautiful
And you were beautiful
And my brain
Had not yet learned
That these two things
Do not automatically
Go together
And I miss that brain
The one that ran
Without calculating
The distance
Or the odds
Or the likelihood
That the rock
Would be received
I just ran
And you had a pocket
And the pocket said yes

[Verse 2]
I made you a card
With nine hearts on it
Not eight
Not ten
Nine
Because nine
Was the number
That felt like the right amount
Of hearts
For a person
Who let me sit next to them
At lunch
On a Wednesday
When the other chairs
Were not taken
You chose the chair next to mine
When the other chairs were available
And that
Was the most romantic thing
That had ever happened to me
And I went home
And counted nine hearts
Onto a piece of paper
And folded it twice
And wrote your name
In the handwriting
Of someone
Who has just learned
That handwriting
Can be a gift

And you kept it
My mother told me later
She found it
In your coat
Three months after
You had probably forgotten
What the nine hearts
Were for
But the coat remembered
And the coat
Is my earliest evidence
That love
Survives
In the pockets
Of people
Who have moved on
To other things

[Bridge]
Bà ngoại says
The first love
Is the truest one
Not because it lasts
But because it does not know
It is supposed to

The first love
Has no reference point
No comparison
No scale
It arrives
With a rock
And a theory
That the rock
Explains everything
And the theory is wrong
And the theory
Is the most correct thing
You will ever believe
Because you believed it
Before belief
Became a thing
You had to decide

[Outro]
I still pick up rocks sometimes
The grey ones
With the white line through
And I do not give them
To anyone
But I notice them
Which is the scar
And the gift
Of having once believed
That a rock
Was a sufficient explanation
For love
And it was
And it was