Soria Moria

[Chorus]
Slow pulsing
Red tower lights
Across a distance
Refuge in the dust

[Verse 1]
All my life I can remember longing
Looking across the water and seeing lights
When I was five or six, we were camping in the islands in July
The tall yellow grass and the rose hips fragrant after sunset
Island beyond island
Undulating and familiar
Not far from home
With my fragrant, whittled, cedar driftwood dagger in the mildew canvas tent
I saw fireworks many miles away but didn't hear them
And I felt a longing, a childish melancholy, and then I went to sleep
And the aching was buried, dreaming, aging
Reaching for an idea of somewhere other than this place that could fold me in clouded yearning for nowhere actually reachable
The distance was the point

And then when I was twenty-four, I followed this ache to an arctic Norwegian cabin
Where I said "fuck the world" in a finally satisfying way
I stayed through the winter and emerged as an adult
Holding a letter from you, an invitation
So I flew back and drove back, and when we met in person it was instant
It didn't matter where we lived as long as we were together
And that was really true for thirteen years
And the whole time still

[Chorus]
Slow pulsing
Red tower lights
Across a distance
Refuge in the dust

[Verse 2]
In January, you were alive still but chemo had ravaged and transformed your porcelain into some other thing
Something jaundiced and fucked
They put you in the hospital in Everett so I gave the baby away
And drove up and down I-5 every night like a satellite bringing you food that you wanted
Returning at night to sleep in our bed, cold
I went back to feel alone there
All past selves and future possibilities on hold while I tore through the dark on the freeway
The old yearning burning in me
I knew exactly where the road bent around
Where the trees opened up and I could see
Way above the horizon
Beyond innumerable islands
The towers on top of the mountain lit up slowly, silently beaconing as if to say:
"Just keep going
There is a place where a wind could erase this for you
And the branches could white noise you back awake"
So I went back to feel alone there but cradled you in me

In the National Gallery in Oslo there's a painting called Soria Moria
A kid looks across a deep canyon of fog at a lit-up inhuman castle or something

I have not stopped looking across the water from the few difficult spots where you can see that the distance from this haunted house where I live to Soria Moria is a real traversable space
I'm an arrow now
Midair

[Chorus]
Slow pulsing
Red tower lights
Across a distance
Refuge in the dust