DISASSEMBLY INSTRUCTIONS

Lyrics

Verse 1 He came with too many moving parts Too much noise beneath the skin So every time somebody flinched He took another piece from him Removed the anger first Then anything that needed love Filed the edges off his voice Till “fine” was all that came out There’s a manual in his head Printed black and white: If a part becomes a problem remove the part from sight Chorus So he takes himself apart One piece at a time Anything that makes him difficult Gets left behind Pull the wanting from the wiring Pull the sorrow from the frame If there’s nothing left to trouble you Then nothing needs his name He calls it maintenance Calls it keeping things controlled But you can only strip a machine so far Before there’s nothing left to hold Verse 2 Every mistake becomes a hammer Every memory becomes rust Every kindness makes him wonder What they’re expecting back from us So he runs himself too hot Never stops to cool it down Lets the bearings scream for mercy Still refuses to shut down Because broken things are burdens And burdens take up space So he keeps destroying evidence That anything was wrong in the first place Chorus He takes himself apart One piece at a time Anything that makes him human Gets classified as a design flaw inside Pull the hunger from the wiring Pull the tenderness away Make him easier to live with Make him smaller every day He calls it maintenance Everybody calls him strong Nobody notices the machine Has been dismantling itself all along Bridge And somewhere on the floor Between the pieces he removed Are all the things he hated That proved he was human too The need to be held The need to be heard The stupid little hope That somebody might notice the hurt He thought self-destruction Would make everybody free Never considered the thing he was destroying was somebody too. Final Chorus Now he’s taking himself apart One piece at a time But the last light on the dashboard Just refuses to die It flickers through the wreckage Through the stripped and empty frame Like some defective little circuit Still repeating his name He calls it malfunction Calls it weakness Calls it anything but hope But maybe some machines weren’t built to run alone Outro No explosion. No grand goodbye. Just a man quietly removing himself from his own life piece by piece because he thought becoming nothing was the kindest thing he could do.