After All

Dar Williams

Go ahead push your luck

Find out how much love the world can hold

Once upon a time I had control and reined my soul in tight

Well the whole truth

Is like the story of a wave unfurled

But I held the evil of the world

So I stopped the tide

Froze it up from inside

And it felt like

A winter machine that you go through and then

You catch your breath and winter starts again

And everyone else is spring bound

But when I chose to live

There was no joy it's just a line I crossed

It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost

So I was not lost or found

And if I was to sleep

I knew my family had more truth to tell

And so I traveled down a whispering well

To know myself through them

Growing up my mom had a room full of books

And hid away in there

Her father raging down a spiral stair

Till he found someone most days his son

And sometimes I think my father, too, is a refugee

I know they tried to keep their pain from me

They could not see what it was for

But now I'm sleeping fine

Sometimes the truth is like a second chance

I am the daughter of a great romance

And they are the children of the war

Well the sun rose

With so many colors it nearly broke my heart

It worked me over like a work of art

And I was apart of all that

So go ahead push your luck

Say what it is you gotta say to me

We will push on into that mystery

And it will push right back

And there are worse things than that

Cuz for every price and every penance that I could think of

It's better to have fallen in love

Than never to have fallen at all

Cuz when you live in a world

Well it gets in to who you thought you'd be

And now I laugh at how the world changed me

I think life chose me

After all