| I sing to you
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| I sing to you, Geneviève
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| I sing to you
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| You don’t exist
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| I sing to you though
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| When I address you, who am I talking to?
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| Standing in the front yard like an open wound
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| Repeating «I love you», to who?
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| I recorded all these songs about the echoes in our house now
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| And then walked out the door to play them on a stage
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| But I sing to you
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| I picture you
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| When we first met, you were 22
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| And I drove my truck onto the ferry to Victoria in the morning
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| Where we met and talked forever in your apartment with evening falling
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| So I brought my blankets in and slept on the floor right next to your bed
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| In the morning, barely awake, I saw you standing right above me
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| Peeling an orange and looking hungry
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| «Do you want some,» you asked me
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| And then just avalanched into me with pieces of orange
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| And weight and kissing and certainty
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| I remember you a few days later in Tofino
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| Where we’d driven to play a show you’d set up for us at a surf shop to no one
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| Then we slept in the back of my truck and got woken up by the cops
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| And so went down to the fishing boat docks to ask whoever for a ride
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| Across the water to Meares Island to just get left there for the day
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| And we did, and brought some food to eat and went through the big trees
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| Abandoned and in love, totally insane, apart from the rest of the world
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| We had finally found each other in the universe
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| Lying on the rocks, waiting for the boat to come pick us up
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| I read the one book we had with us aloud
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| With my head on your lap, sinking into you
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| Tintin in Tibet in French
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| And we thought of devotion and snow and distant longing in the Himalayan air
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| High and cold, with a bell ringing out
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| Then right before you died, thirteen years later in our house
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| I remember, through your gasping for oxygen, you explained that you were
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| thinking about that high, cold air
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| Wrapping the globe, singing above the mountains of the gods
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| And I do picture you there, molecules dancing
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| But I’d rather you were in the house watching the unfolding everyday life of
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| this good daughter we made
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| Instead of being scattered by the wind for no reason
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| So I sing to you |