From the album Of Earth & Wires
This is a song about grief disguised as water. The flood is not destruction. It is the overwhelming clarity that comes when you finally feel everything you have been holding back, and the relationship that once felt balanced now exists only in memory.
Well you wouldn't know if it wasn't water / That it was raining / You caught the flood
Grief does not announce itself. It arrives looking like something manageable until you are already drowning in it. Saleh frames emotional overwhelm as invisible until it is already inside you.
Oh but this grief inside me growling / At the Earth / Love be patient / What's the hurry
The grief is animal, restless, demanding. But Saleh talks themselves down, trying to slow the flood by reasoning with it. That second line reads like a plea to their own heart to stop rushing toward pain.
Koi fishes swimming in a pond / Used to be like yin and yang / We was breathing but
That hanging 'but' is the entire song. The koi, the balance, the breathing. All past tense. The sentence never finishes because there is no clean way to explain what broke.
What you want / What you need / Everything in me's reaching out / Offerings
Saleh is still extending themselves toward someone who is not there. The offerings have no recipient. The reaching becomes the flood itself, all that unspent care with nowhere to land.
The water's clear, the water's clear
Repetition as insistence. Clear water means you can see straight through to the bottom, to what you lost. Clarity is not comfort. It is just seeing the truth without anything left to obscure it.
The flood is clarity. You survive it by letting it move through you instead of fighting to stay dry. Saleh does not resolve the grief or the loss. They just stop pretending the water is not there.