Like Notes From a Wind Chime Lyrics

From the balcony

She can hear the ocean weaving

Mixed with the decision of

Another one night stand

She's had her whole life to plan

To disappear into obscurity

And no one would know

That she'd ever lived her life

As some minor character in somebody else's show

To namelessly fade into the blues and greens

Of the northern Oregon coast

And she sees the symmetry in all of it

Born without a consciousness

Dead without a second thought or momentary regret

A calculated meaningless event

I slept with her for three months

April to June of '97

Walk the golf course in the evening

Down along the shoreline

The Pacific's always cold in Oregon

Us never saying anything

And never knowing what her name was

Well I don't think she had one

She wanted to be like the notes

Played by her wind chimes

Blown in from the coastline

And vanishing into the night sky

As we were laying in bed

Two shadows cast against the silence

She said "I'm gonna live to be twenty-five

And then die"

And as I walked home alone

Through faded rain and washed out meadows

I realized she was already a ghost

And so was I

She wasn't here at all

And when I stayed with her I wasn't here at all

The apartment by the shore subject to haunting

Every time that she called me

Told me she wanted

To feel for an evening

Like someone with a heartbeat

And as a coda:

By 2001 I had moved on down

To northern California

And forgotten all about her

Til a night when I was lost in my late twenties

Stumbling somewhere by the ocean

And I heard the notes from far-off wind chimes

Mixing with the crashing of the waves upon the cliff sides

And those months all came back shattering

Shattering, and everything about

Her darkened bedroom was vivid as if dreaming

The stormy sky and sound of waves were calming

The emptiness of sleeping

With a stranger in whose silence you sense something

So profoundly sad and human and revealing

And I didn't have to look her up to know

I wouldn't find her

To know that she was gone

If she was ever there at all

If she was ever there at all

She wasn't ever there at all

She wasn't ever there at all

If she was ever there at all