Gremlin Heart (Don't Feed It After Midnight)

[Intro] (The track starts with the sound of a gentle, lonely rain tapping against a window pane. A simple, melancholic piano melody loops, drenched in reverb.) There were three rules. So simple. I broke them all. But the last one... the last one broke me.

[Verse 1] You gave me something fragile, a creature soft and true It lived inside my ribcage and it sang a song of you We kept it in the quiet, away from all the glare Of a world that couldn't understand a love so pure and rare But the bright light of the ending was a truth we couldn't hide It burned away the shadows where our perfect thing could hide And all that I had left of it was beautiful and sad The sweetest, softest memory a man has ever had.

[Chorus] But my love has a gremlin heart, it's wild and incomplete And I broke the final rule they warn you on the street Don't feed it after midnight, don't let it take a bite Of memories you keep alive in the cold and lonely night 'Cause my love has a gremlin heart, and when the clock strikes twelve That sweet and gentle memory becomes a different self A monster made of misery, of everything I miss And it promises me chaos with a sharp and toothy kiss.

[Verse 2] Then the salt from my own sorrow was the water that it drank And a hundred tiny heartaches started swimming in the tank They multiplied the loneliness, they amplified the pain A thousand little demons screaming out your name in the rain Now they're hiding in the corners of this empty king-sized bed Replaying every conversation, everything we said They're whispering your promises, the ones you didn't keep And they only come alive at night when I am supposed to sleep.

[Chorus] 'Cause my love has a gremlin heart, it's wild and incomplete And I broke the final rule they warn you on the street Don't feed it after midnight, don't let it take a bite Of memories you keep alive in the cold and lonely night 'Cause my love has a gremlin heart, and when the clock strikes twelve That sweet and gentle memory becomes a different self A monster made of misery, of everything I miss And it promises me chaos with a sharp and toothy kiss.

[Bridge] This quiet house is now a cinema of sin They're swinging from the fixtures where our love used to begin Tearing up the Polaroids to make themselves feel whole They're re-wiring the circuits of my own godforsaken soul This isn't grief, it's anarchy, a carnival of dread A beautiful new creature that I wish was dead instead But I'm the one who fed it, I'm the one who let it turn Another lesson in the dark I guess I'll never learn.

[Outro] (The piano melody becomes more distorted and warped. The sound of rain gets heavier.) It's 3 AM... And it's hungry again... It's always hungry... Until the sun comes... If the sun comes... (The music and rain slowly fade into a low, unsettling hum, which then cuts to silence.)