Altitude Lines

[Verse 1]
The 7 AM out of Hopkins banks hard over Erie.
Your thumbprint's still a smudge on the cold window pane.
I watch the smokestacks shrink, a future getting blurry,
a city laid out flat beneath the engine's strain.

[Chorus]
From thirty-thousand feet, it's all altitude lines,
stitching the rust-colored grid that you and I designed.
Every bridge a backstitch, every street a seam,
but the pressure in the cabin is a different kind of dream.

[Verse 2]
I smell the steel on your work coat where you held me so tight.
You said, "Call me when you're through the pressure change."
Tracing the Cuyahoga's crooked, silver light,
trying to find our window, trying to rearrange.

[Chorus]
From thirty-thousand feet, it's all altitude lines,
stitching the rust-colored grid that you and I designed.
Every bridge a backstitch, every street a seam,
but the pressure in the cabin is a different kind of dream.

[Bridge]
Is this the grain of the cloth, this temporary tear?
Or just a loose weave from the weight we have to bear?

[Chorus]
From thirty-thousand feet, it's all altitude lines,
stitching the rust-colored grid that you and I designed.
Every bridge a backstitch, every street a seam,
but the pressure in the cabin is a different kind of dream.

[Outro]
Just a silver needle in a faded grey sky.
Yeah, a silver needle just passing you by.