Signal opens underwater. One word, whispered three times before the beat commits. Signal. Signal. Signal.
I wrote the chorus first, and on paper it is almost nothing. Echo like waves. I am sending out a signal. Ready for your arrival. That thin line repeats until it stops sounding like a lyric and starts sounding like a pulse. I kept waiting for the song to need more words. It never did. The repetition is the instrument.
The verses are phone calls. Verse one goes to the voice that said I wasn’t the fit, the one who tried to write me off. I’m not calling to argue. I’m not calling to prove. I’m calling you home. Verse two goes to the opposite voice, the one who never let me quit, who logged my every fall. I’m not calling to be saved. I’m not calling for more fight. Same last line. I’m calling you home.
That parallel took me the longest to accept. The doubt and the drive get the identical invitation. For most of my life I treated those two voices as enemies in a war I was hosting, and I picked a side every morning. Signal refuses the war. Both voices get called in. Both belong to me. A house with rooms locked from the inside is not a home, and I was tired of living in one.
Then the bridge turns the whole song inside out. I thought I was calling out. I thought I was sending out. Then I heard the signal echo back in my voice. The frequency was always mine. I’ve been calling myself home. Every transmission I thought I was aiming at someone else had my own voice carried inside it. The summons was a mirror the entire time.
So the final chorus changes exactly one word. Ready for your arrival becomes ready for my arrival. One pronoun. That is the whole plot of the song, and I sang it with my full chest because the shift cost more than the size of the edit suggests.
Here is the part I have not resolved. Some days the signal goes out and nothing echoes back. The frequency is mine, I know that now, and I still catch myself scanning the water for somebody else’s answer. Knowing the truth of a song does not mean living inside it yet. I sit in the gap between those two things more often than the finished track admits.
The outro does not end so much as sink. My arrival. Arrival. Signal. One word diminishing into deep water, back where the song began, except now you know who was transmitting.
If you have spent years broadcasting to people who never picked up, check the frequency. It was tuned to you the whole time.