SIX MINUS ONE

They taught us numbers like they stayed the same

Like nothing living ever left the frame

Six names written underneath one roof

Six different voices, six different truths

Then somebody tore a number from the line

And everybody said we’d heal with time

But you can’t solve a life with simple sums

You don’t stop counting just because one’s gone

They call it loss

Like something misplaced

Like I could turn around

And find what was erased

Six minus one

Still doesn’t equal five

Not when the missing one

Is everywhere inside

There’s an empty chair

There’s a name I still say

There’s a hole in every photograph

That never fades away

Do the math

Tell me what I’ve become

When six was everything

And now we’re six minus one

I’ve watched the living learn to carry ghosts

Smile for the world while breaking where it doesn’t show

I’ve heard “move on” from people passing through

Like moving forward means I’m leaving you

So I built a home inside the aftermath

Turned every scar into another track

If darkness has a language, I know every tongue

I learned them all when six became minus one

Don’t call me healed

Don’t call me done

Some wounds don’t close

You just learn how to run

Six minus one

Still doesn’t equal five

Not when the missing one

Is everywhere inside

There’s an empty chair

There’s a name I still say

There’s a hole in every photograph

That never fades away

Do the math

Tell me what I’ve become

When six was everything

And now we’re six minus one

ONE GONE

FIVE HERE

SIX FOREVER

ONE SILENCE

FIVE HEARTBEATS

SIX TOGETHER

COUNT US AGAIN

COUNT US AGAIN

I won’t subtract you from the story

I won’t reduce you to the past

You are the reason every beautiful thing

Feels like it has to fight to last

And if they ask me why the music

Always sounds a little like the end

It’s because I learned that love can lose a body

But it doesn’t lose a friend

It doesn’t lose a brother

It doesn’t lose a son

Six minus one

Will never equal five

Because the ones we lose

Don’t stop being part of our lives

There’s an empty chair

But your name still remains

You’re in every fucking heartbeat

You’re in everything I make

So do the math

You can say that I’m wrong

But six was everything

And six is what we are.

One missing.

Never erased.

Six minus one.