You're spit in the centre of your hometown. And there are leaves in the street, and there are friends around you now, and all the days in your life in a line (or the way they seemed by '89)... But it's not all right. It's not even close to all right.
Down a hall of a house. Down a road in December. Down, down the deep river.
We lie awake at night in a tent. I say, "Tell me about your uncle and his friend, because they seem like very bad men. We want to keep away from them!" (Bend in the road back there. We saw the place they go.)
"Tell me about the greatest show, or the greatest movie you know, or the greatest song that you taped from off the radio. Play it again and again. (It cuts off at the ending, though.) Tell me I'm always going to be your best friend. You said it one time - why don't you say it again? All the way down the line to where the telephone ends, come on and shout it on down the wire! And that it's not all right, that it's not even close to all right."
Down a hall of a house. Down a road in December. Down, down the deep river.
And as the rescue party, the volunteer team - they're just kids of eighteen, and it's the worst thing they've seen - as they're all standing around that tree, I'm so sorry, and I can't stop crying.
Shivering from the late fall cold, I felt like a solid ghost. I ran, and I couldn't slow. My father found me though, and my father took me home. He said, "Oh son, I saw you get knocked down and I ran out. I bet your head was spinning! With that bright pain you're stunned, when you've only just begun to be only just beginning. Tossed in the viper pit, all those feelings and fears and all that difficult sh** in those tender years. There was something in the air... Something gathered in the air. Something singing in the wind... Oh, I'll be your fighter, and you'll be my mirror, and you'll be all right because I'll be right here. Oh, kid, I'm not going anywhere. I swear I'll try to not be going anywhere. Though it's not all right, it's so far from all right, we'll make it into a choice somehow. I don't know. But you'll have a choice somehow.
"Down a hall of our old house. Now nobody lives there, and we can never go back, and we can only remember.
"And maybe they told you about the summer sky. And maybe they said there's a great gold spirit in the summer sky, and all your friends - all your best, best friends - are going to gather around your bed at night. Well, that doesn't make it all right, because it's still so far from all right. Oh, kid, I know."
Down a hall of our house. Down a road in December. Up the stairs, four flights up, can you feel my heart shiver? Waking in the dawn, with that dream getting dimmer and dimmer. Say you still se it. Say you remember. Are we going down the deep river? I know it's scary, baby.