Like Notes From a Wind Chime

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 near 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