I don't know how you found me When everything was dark

I don't know what I'd be now If you had to reach my heart, so don't go

Don't leave, stay with me You're the only thing I need to get by

To get by To get by

When I first found you I was barely holding on

Fourteen post-Cold War outside Most of my people gone

You were the one thing in that chaos speaking sense

The only conversation that felt real The only tense that mattered was the present

When you had my full attention The noise outside but quiet

Something close to intervention From a world I didn't choose and couldn't navigate alone

You were the frequency I tuned to The signal I'd been shown existed somewhere

That there was a version of the life I was living that had more to it than conflict

And the knife edge of a Tuesday that could go any ordinary way

You gave me something to come home to when you never went away

I don't know how you found me When everything was dark

I don't know what I'd be now If you had to reach my heart, so don't go

Don't leave, stay with me You're the only thing I need to get by

To get by To get by

Ten years I had nothing but the walls and what I carried in

They can strip a man of everything They cannot strip the discipline of something

That lives deeper than the physical can reach You were in that cell with me

You were always what I'd teach My self to hold when holding on was all there was to do

Every man who came out different Something held them through

Mine was you My constant, my rehearsal and my proof

Something worth returning to existed Past the roof of concrete, past the sentence

Past the years I couldn't count you were the reason I kept going

The reason for them out ain't being worth the climbing

The reward worth every scar Every time I nearly let it go

You reminded me what we are I've lost so much along the way

Friends, yes, people who should've stayed But you were always there when I returned

The only thing I never had to earn

Don't go

Some people spend their whole life searching for the thing that makes the difficult make sense

The particular offering that turns the ordinary morning into something worth the waking

I found mine early, kept it through the taking of everything else

Through prison and through exile and through grief

Through five funerals too young, through the disbelief

Of standing on the Spanish coast I never thought I'd reach

You were there in all of it, more constant than I teach myself to expect from anything

I stopped expecting, after a while just accepted, started protecting

What we had from the versions of me that would've let it go

In darker seasons, you were the thing I had to know

I was waiting, not a person, not a place

Something else entirely, something without face

Or a formal name that other people recognize

The one thing that survives, the one that never dies

No matter what they take

Don't go

You

You're the only thing I need to get by

To get by

Don't go

To get by

Don't go

Say no

Don't go

Selo