Business Opportunities

[Verse]

It was mostly peaceful, chaotic, but mostly peaceful chaos

I took my shoes off

I got ready with how I was feeling

I ate the apple and lost myself to paradise

But the thing they don't tell you is that it's your body that leaves your soul

Not the other way around

You can literally feel your heart stop beating

And it's not, it's not even that strange

You know what's gonna happen, but you aren't angry that you do know

And in fact, the fact that you do know gives you some secret feeling of bliss

And it's not in any way diminished

When that thing that you know is going to happen does eventually happen

That's how I felt

I felt happy in a secret way

Naked, obviously

Angry that I could hear voices

But really, like, I was at peace with everything

Just me and my slowly slowing heart in a crowd of faces asking me for my name and what the date was

And whether or not we were in a time of national crisis

I don't know, kindness is so strange

The shame doesn't really capture the feeling, you know

How it felt to be in front of them like that

Blinking like a cat who just found out the mouse he's been trying to kill for the last ten years just ate his last piece of cheese

The only strange thing was that I could see anything at all, let alone their faces

I definitely wasn't supposed to be seeing anything

Demetria promised me I wouldn't

I felt very, very cold

It gets cold up there in the winter

Even colder if you've got nothing on

I remember saying that I hadn't taken much

Which was a lie, of course

They were all looking at me like I was the perfect example of everything that was wrong with being general

And my generation in particular

Why was the first thing I said when I came back an incredibly obvious lie?

I guess that says a lot about me, doesn't it?

God, it was miserable

I remember them asking me if I had anywhere to stay

And me pausing for way too long

While knowing that the answer was obviously no

And then saying no

And how terribly quiet they all got standing there

Staring at me on that very cold winter morning

This one goes out to the concept of luck

That pure, blind luck that makes the women's netball team walk back a different route around the meadows

A route that takes them past whatever I was at that point

That kind of luck

Monica brought that fact up to me later while I was lying in her bed

Trying to figure out if there was a way to intercept the suicide notes I had mailed to ten different international news media conglomerates

She said, a little too triumphantly, I think

That if she hadn't ordered that eighth round of shots, then they would have left early and I wouldn't have been there

And that if she hadn't decided

In her, as I was soon to discover, classically whimsical way

To lead the gang after that eight round of shots back around a different way just because she felt like it

Then she wouldn't have found me at all

She found that that was all very relevant

So do I, I guess

When we slept together that night for the first time, I saw stars

It was beautiful

So, yeah, this one goes out to luck

And drunk, mad women