Song 90: Mature

Lyrics

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
I used to love you like a project
Like a house I was always renovating
Knocking out a wall here
Rewiring something there
Convinced the blueprint I had
Was better than the person standing in it

The anterior cingulate was working overtime
Filing complaints about the discrepancy
Between who you were
And who I had commissioned
And the complaints department
Was always busy
And the person kept standing in the blueprint
Not matching
And breathing anyway

[Pre-Chorus]
And the mature thing
The thing that took me thirty years
And two languages
And a grandmother who said
Người ta không phải là đất sét
People are not clay

Was to put the blueprint down

[Chorus]
L'amour mûr, l'amour mûr
The love that threw the renovation plans away
L'amour mûr, l'amour mûr
And found the house was beautiful the day
I stopped insisting on the windows I had wanted
And looked through the ones you came with
And the view was fine
The view was always fine
I was just standing in the wrong room

[Verse 2]
The orbitofrontal cortex
Processes expectation versus outcome
And for years it flagged you
As a deviation from the spec
The way a quality inspector
Flags a thread count that doesn't match the label

But the thread count was yours
And the sheets were warm
And I was sleeping well in them
Every single night
While filing the complaint
Every single morning

Bà ngoại would have laughed
She married a man who snored
Like a motorbike going uphill
And she loved him for forty years
And the snoring was never the problem
The problem was the year it stopped

[Pre-Chorus]
And the mature thing
Was not learning to tolerate
Tolerance is a ceiling
The mature thing was
Discovering that the thing I wanted to fix
Was the thing I would miss the most
If it left the room

[Chorus]
L'amour mûr, l'amour mûr
The love that threw the renovation plans away
L'amour mûr, l'amour mûr
And found the house was beautiful the day
I stopped insisting on the windows I had wanted
And looked through the ones you came with
And the view was fine
The view was always fine
I was just standing in the wrong room

[Bridge]
The neuroplasticity of acceptance
Is that the brain physically rewires
When you stop resisting what is
The default mode network quiets down
The rumination fades
And the prefrontal cortex
Which spent decades
Drafting a better version of the person beside you
Finally looks up from the desk
And sees them
For the first time
As they are


And they are not the blueprint
And they are not the deviation
They are the person
Who stayed in the building
While you renovated around them
And never once
Asked you to stop
And that patience
Was the love
You were too busy remodelling to see

[Outro]
L'amour mûr
The blueprint is in the recycling
The house is warm