Song 88: Monoamorous

Lyrics

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
The world is a restaurant
With nine hundred pages of menu
And I ordered the same thing
For the eleventh year in a row
And the waiter has stopped asking
And I have stopped explaining
And the not explaining
Is the most fluent thing
I have ever said in any language

There is a kind of freedom
That looks like limitation
The way a river looks limited
By its banks
But the banks are why the river
Goes somewhere
Instead of everywhere
Which is nowhere
With better marketing

[Pre-Chorus]
Một người — one person
Một hướng — one direction
Và tôi không thiếu gì cả
And I am not missing anything at all

[Chorus]
L'amour d'un seul, l'amour d'un seul
The love that chose one door in a hallway full of doors
L'amour d'un seul, l'amour d'un seul
Not because the other doors were locked
But because this one had your coat on the hook
And your smell in the curtains
And the particular way the light falls
At four in the afternoon
On a Tuesday in November
When the heating clicks on
And the whole apartment says
Someone lives here who chose this
And keeps choosing this
And the choosing is not settling
The choosing is the most radical thing
A heart with options
Has ever done

[Verse 2]
Bà ngoại married once
In a village where the options
Were fewer than the fingers on one hand
And people said that's not choice
That's geography

But I watched her choose him
Every morning for forty years
In the small ways that don't photograph well
The tea made first
The blanket adjusted in the night
The name said softly
To see if he was still awake
And he always was
And the always was
Was not geography
It was the most deliberate act
Of navigation I have ever witnessed

[Pre-Chorus]
Một người — one person
Repeatedly
Là đủ — is enough
And enough is not a small word
Enough is the word
That ate all the other words
And was satisfied

[Chorus]
L'amour d'un seul, l'amour d'un seul
The love that chose one door in a hallway full of doors
L'amour d'un seul, l'amour d'un seul
Not because the other doors were locked
But because this one
Had everything I needed
To stop looking
And start seeing

[Bridge]
They'll tell you monogamy
Is a cage or a contract
Or a failure of imagination

But I have imagined everything
I have a mind that builds cathedrals
For breakfast
And I looked at all the cathedrals
And I looked at you
Making coffee in your terrible robe
With the news on too loud
And the toast burning slightly
And I thought

Yes
That one
Again
Tomorrow
And the day after tomorrow
And every day that has a morning in it


The cage is not the choosing
The cage was the corridor
And the choosing set me free

[Outro]
L'amour d'un seul
One