# Ballerina Boy > **One-line reading.** The wound-song and the origin chamber — a seven-year-old burying himself alive, the same shame returning twenty years later in the music industry's uniform, and the moment the whole world shows why [[Sir Lucius]] had to exist. If [[Not Your Homie]] is the shadow snarling *you don't know me*, this is the buried child saying *come back for me*. > [!info] Album & credits > **Release:** standalone single, **June 13 2025** — a 3-track release (~9 min; the other two tracks aren't yet pinned in this guide), plus a same-day Dolby Atmos mix. Label: ℗ 2025 Big Loud Rock, under exclusive license to Mercury Records (UMG). Not on [[Lucius Lullaby (album)]]. > **Written by** Roy English (sole composer / lyricist) · **Produced, vocal-produced & string-arranged by** Jagwar Twin · background vocals **MERCY** · strings, guitars and a small orchestra's worth of Luke Villegas (guitar / bouzouki / autoharp / lute), Dan Adams (violin), No Love (cello). > **Lyrics:** [Genius](https://genius.com) · streaming > **▶ Listen:** [Official video (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSPLVLWMG-k) ## At a glance - **Era / release** — standalone single, June 13 2025; kept off the *[[Lucius Lullaby (album)|Lucius Lullaby]]* record it sat right beside. - **In one line** — the childhood injury the entire arc is a response to, told as literal autobiography and answered not with success but with rescue. - **Who speaks** — [[Roy]], first-person and undefended (no mask); an in-story earthly father; the schoolyard [[The Crowd|girls and teacher]]; and, in the spoken outro, an older motherly voice most likely [[Mary]]-class. [[Sir Lucius]] is never named — but he's the shape the wound cuts. - **Key symbols** — [[The Moon]] · [[The Mask]] · the stage · the grave. ## The song, mapped The song is a two-act autobiography with a time-jump: the same wound delivered twice, twenty years apart, in different clothes. Its own shape *is* the argument — so here it is, beat by beat. | Beat | In the song | What it does | |---|---|---| | **Opening refrain** | *"I know it's not simple / I know it's not fair / there's nobody else like you / out there"* | The blessing arrives **first** — before the wound is even told. The song opens on its own answer, then goes back to earn it. | | **Verse 1 — the wound (age 7)** | *"I came alive when I was on that stage"* → teacher to father, *"we think your son is gay"* (overheard) → *"gay must mean bad… I prayed to God to make me good"* → *"the only boy in class / stood back against the wall"* → the girls: **"you're not a real boy" (×4)** | A Christian school turns social shame into *moral* shame — not "you dance wrong" but "you are bad." *"You're not a real boy"* attacks being, not behavior. This is the founding injury, told in sequence. | | **The father's blessing** | *"he looked me in the eyes and said / there's nothing wrong with you, my son"* | The one piece of love available — and, crucially, phrased in the **negative**. Hold this line; the outro will answer it in a different key. | | **Refrain, expanded** | the *"not simple / not fair"* lines, plus *"I know it's not easy / it's hard when you care"* | The blessing repeats and deepens. Caring is named as the thing that costs. | | **The burial** | *"I never danced again / I killed that ballerina boy / I buried him inside / it's like I didn't have a choice"* | The hinge of the whole project. The child doesn't cry it out and recover — he performs an **internal execution**. The grave is dug at seven; everything after grows from it. | | **Verse 2 — the time-jump (age 17 → the industry)** | *"17 started a band and I was on a mission"* · the intimate *"you"* who *"always listened… always had my back"* · *"felt like I could disappear and no one else would notice"* · *"couldn't afford an egg McMuffin / music just wasn't landing, I heard / you're not a real boy… what makes a real boy?"* | The leap forward — and the schoolyard chant **survives it intact**. The label and the algorithm reuse the girls' verdict verbatim. *What makes a real boy?* cracks the taunt open into an existential question. | | **The fork** | *"I was faced with a choice / do I kill myself or come back for that kid I let go / this song's for Ballerina boy / this song's a prayer for hope"* | The climax, and the song **names its own resolution**. The alternatives are self-destruction or descent-and-rescue — and the chosen answer is *integration*, not achievement. (More below; this is the load-bearing move.) | | **Closing refrains** | the *"not simple / not fair"* and *"not easy / hard when you care"* lines return, layered under an answering *"(nobody else like you)"* | The opening blessing comes back around, now earned by everything between. | | **Spoken outro** — one voice, whole thing | self-discovery (*"we don't really know who we are until… something clicks inside and says this is me"*) → the blessing (*"you are one of a kind, God's design / so my son, let your light shine"*) → the moon line (*"the moon reminds us that even in the darkness there is light"*) → the address to the child (*"there's no one else like you out there"*) | Delivered start-to-finish by an older, **motherly female voice**. The wound was *"you're not a real boy"*; the deepest blessing lands in the feminine voice, exactly where shame tried to erase him. | The argument in one line: **wound → burial → the wound returns in new clothes → the fork → inward rescue → feminine blessing at the site of the erasure.** ## What it means A handful of claims cut across the whole song. **The child buried himself — and everything else is built on the grave.** The response to *"you're not a real boy"* wasn't sorrow, it was an execution: *"I killed that ballerina boy / I buried him inside."* A seven-year-old interred the embodied, stage-alive, undefended part of himself, and the masks, the protector, the depression, and the decades-long search all grow out of that hole. This is the [[Concepts/Nigredo|first "blackening"]] event in the arc — the age-7 burial that the later age-35 collapse (dropped by a major label, a breakup, writing *Lucius Lullaby* from a childhood bedroom) rhymes with. **The structure is the loop.** Verse one is the schoolyard; verse two is the industry — and the mechanism is *identical* across schoolyard, religion, label, algorithm, audience, and money: **sacrifice the true self so the outer world stops punishing you.** That egg McMuffin is the whole thing in one detail — a man at the most extreme fork imaginable, and the emblem of rock-bottom he reaches for is that he couldn't afford a fast-food breakfast. Cosmic stakes measured in hash browns; genuinely funny and genuinely devastating in the same breath, because humiliation scaled down to breakfast is still humiliation. Ballerina Boy is where the exact logic [[Sir Lucius]] later weaponizes in [[Not Your Homie]] and [[Welcome to the Circus]] *began* — before it had a face. **The answer is not success.** Look at the choice Roy declines to offer himself. At the fork he never asks *do I become successful?* — he asks *do I come back for that kid I let go?* The chosen answer is **integration, not achievement**: it goes inward *first*, the exact inverse of a bargain song that says win the outer game and maybe feel something later. *"This song's for Ballerina boy / a prayer for hope."* The song isn't a report of a rescue; it *is* the rescue — a ritual object with the kid's name in it. It rhymes structurally with [[The Circle]] (*the inside of the inside*) and [[The Thread]] (the feeling retrieved, not traded). **Blessing, not armor — and the two blessings aren't equal.** The song answers hostility with blessing twice, in two voices that are easy to conflate and shouldn't be. The **father's** — *"there's nothing wrong with you, my son"* — is real love that fails anyway, because it's stated in the *negative*: a pardon that still operates inside the same right/wrong courtroom the teacher and the girls used. It acquits the charge without leaving the court. The **outro's** — *"you are one of a kind, God's design… let your light shine"* — is *generative*: it claims the child's nature outright instead of answering an accusation. Telling a shamed child *you are not broken* is not the same as *you are, exactly as you are, good.* Both parental voices protect by blessing; Lucius protects by armoring. The whole resolution lives in that difference — and that the deepest blessing arrives in the **feminine** voice, precisely at the site of the wound, is the song's quiet thesis. (Both lines say *"my son,"* which makes them easy to hear as one speaker; they're two.) **It declines the metric.** The song refuses the performance economy on its own terms — it doesn't compete with Lucius for virality, it *opts out of the scoreboard*. It risks being "low-performing" precisely because its worth isn't denominated in streams. Form and content agree all the way down: the off-album single about the off-album child, kept out of the very spectacle it diagnoses. (The kid who got told he didn't belong made a song that didn't make the tracklist — the structure rhymes so cleanly it's almost a bit. *Why* it was kept off the album is not publicly stated, so that's a wink at the irony, not a claimed intent.) ## The autobiography behind it This is the rare Jagwar Twin song whose backstory is not mythology. It's **literal autobiography**, told publicly by Roy *outside* the lyric — and triple-grounded: the song, a sit-down interview, and, independently, a concert-venue artist bio that simply notes he "embraced ballet as a child while his peers pursued sports." In the interview telling, the picture is even more disarming than the lyric: a kid who wanted to be an *actor*, whose mom enrolled him in dance class instead (the school had no acting lessons), turning up as "a little blonde bowl cut… tights, ballet shoes, tap shoes," the only boy in the room and — this is the tender part — not even realizing it, "so stoked, having so much fun." Then the girls, the taunt, coming home crying "I'm never gonna dance again," the shame "pushed so deep into your subconscious you don't know where it came from." He's careful to add it's "not the little girls' fault." And he ties it forward to something the song never mentions: his adult **dance videos are that shadow-work**, the buried dancer being reclaimed in public, on purpose. So the rescue isn't only sung — it's something Roy is bodily, deliberately doing. ## The place in the mythology **This is, most likely, Lucius's origin wound** — with one careful distinction. [[Sir Lucius]] is *not* the ballerina boy; he's what grows around the grave. When softness is buried as unsurvivable, the psyche still has to live, so it builds the opposite of softness — strategy, performance, control, mockery-before-being-mocked, power-before-vulnerability — and that armor *is* Lucius, formed at the exact moment the child went under. Keep two claims apart, because the genesis reading is harder to wave off as "too clean" when they aren't run together. That the burial *produced* Lucius is interpretation — the song never names him. But that Lucius is *invested* in keeping this grave closed is **grounded fact**, and it's the single most telling piece of evidence. In a theatrical episode of the video series (EP3, [[The Interview]]), Lucius mimes a little ballet move at the camera and sneers: *"Do you know what your lowest-performing song of all time is? Ballerina Boy. When you're vulnerable you LOSE!"* A shadow who fact-checks your streaming numbers to wound you — the inner critic as a guy with a Spotify-for-Artists dashboard — is darkly funny, and the comedy is doing serious work. He mocks exactly *one* song by name, and it's this one. If Roy rescues the buried child, Lucius loses his monopoly on protection; the shadow has a demonstrable stake in keeping the grave shut. And the joke's on him: "lowest-performing" is the *whole point* — the song loses by the scoreboard because it refuses to play that game. He's wielding the one metric it was built to ignore. ## Characters - **[[Roy|Jagwar Twin]]** — first-person, undefended, no mask; the most directly autobiographical song in the body of work. The one who must "come back for that kid I let go." - **[[Ballerina Boy]]** — the buried child himself: softness, embodiment, play, stage-joy, the part told *"you're not a real boy."* Has his own page in the cast; this song is his founding event. (The pre-persona human layer collapses *into* this figure, keeping the interior roster lean.) - **[[Sir Lucius]]** — never named in the lyric, but present as the armor that grows from this burial — and the one who later mocks the song by name to defend his own necessity. - **[[Mary]]** — the motherly outro voice; most likely the clearest divine-feminine appearance in the catalogue, and possibly the earliest. The same faceless feminine blessing recurs in [[Weirdness]] (*"you were born to shine"*) and in [[No. 1 Champion (la Conquistadora)]], where Mary is named outright. - **The earthly father** — narrated inside the story; delivers the in-verse pardon *"there's nothing wrong with you, my son."* Distinct from the outro's feminine voice. - **[[The Crowd|The girls & the teacher]]** — the schoolyard-plus-religious authority that delivers the verdict (*"we think your son is gay"*; *"you're not a real boy"*). ## Artifacts **ROY DIARY 2014** · `J403` — The diary's headline question "Does ANY one understand ME?" is a near-verbatim precursor of the released lyric "I said no one understands me but you always listen", sung about exactly this struggling-artist… → [[Artifacts - Poems, Texts and Social Posts|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xd14909d1145a6a8baf6db46d9a5efee8677c90898ae1dabf470ba720bb340e1e..jpg"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xd14909d1145a6a8baf6db46d9a5efee8677c90898ae1dabf470ba720bb340e1e..jpg" width="200"></a> **DAD'S CLOCK 4 BB ROY** · `ROY'S TOMB` — A keepsake Roy's dad made for baby Roy, unlocked by the code ROY'S TOMB, maps onto the song's two anchors: the father who blesses the wounded child ("there's nothing wrong with you, my son") and the child's… → [[Artifacts - Family, Friends and Moments|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <video src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x6a84e9bf1fd657ad8872f89c876e17efd0627e3b048523896e40627725f99f97..mp4" poster="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x6a84e9bf1fd657ad8872f89c876e17efd0627e3b048523896e40627725f99f97..jpg" width="240" controls preload="none"></video> **ROY STORY "SIR RABBIT** · `Q763` — The Ballerina Boy essay's documented 'buried child and the searching self' section places Sir Rabbit as the wound's direct output — the poem's 'I do not know Sir Rabbit said / But I must be someone' is the i… → [[Artifacts - Poems, Texts and Social Posts|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x2356561424a07a805749ee41a7ad1efe3b2cf7de7056cb2657eac17b04ab8d72..png"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x2356561424a07a805749ee41a7ad1efe3b2cf7de7056cb2657eac17b04ab8d72..png" width="200"></a> **QUEEN BINAH** · `TEETH OF A WHALE` — The spoken outro is delivered by an older motherly female voice ('God's design... let your light shine'), the audio-confirmed Divine-Mother / Mary-class appearance whose Kabbalistic substrate is the God-the-… → [[Artifacts - Drawings and Sketches|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x918baee33033b370951514ca5c356575d0dde2520797978da425fc537e590932..png"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x918baee33033b370951514ca5c356575d0dde2520797978da425fc537e590932..png" width="200"></a> ## Symbols - **[[The Moon]]** — *"the moon reminds us that even in the darkness there is light."* The moon doesn't generate light; it *reflects* it — the signature of borrowed, preserved light: not a source, but proof a source exists somewhere past the dark. This is the *tender* pole of the symbol (preservation-through-darkness), and it quietly reframes the strongly-lunar [[Sir Lucius]] — see below. - **[[The Mask]]** — the survival strategy the wound installs, before it had a face. (Its companion is [[Happy Face]], the perfect-child armor: *"if you're sad don't let it show."*) - **The stage** — where the child "came alive"; the site of joy that becomes the site of shame, and the detail that keeps the burial an open question (a buried child, yet the adult is plainly a stage creature). - **The grave** — *"I buried him inside"*; the internal execution at seven out of which everything grows. ## Connected songs - **[[Not Your Homie]]** — opposite poles of one wound: the shadow says *you don't know me*; the child says *come back for me.* To know Lucius, Roy must know Ballerina Boy. (It's also where Lucius resells the crown [[Mary]] revokes, and where the moon-not-sun reading is loudest.) - **[[Weirdness]]** — the healing pair. The faceless feminine voice — *"you were born to shine"* — answers *"you're not a real boy"*; its child who "danced in the rain" maps onto the same pre-shame freedom as the ballerina. Ballerina Boy is the burial; Weirdness is the reclamation beginning — the first movement out of the [[Concepts/Nigredo|blackening]]. - **[[Happy Face]]** — the coping mechanism the wound installs. - **[[Welcome to the Circus]]** — the public spectacle of the system whose *private origin* is this song. - **[[The Circle]] / [[The Thread]]** — rescue from the inside of the inside; the buried feeling retrieved, not traded. - **[[No. 1 Champion (la Conquistadora)]]** — the divine-feminine voice where Mary is named. - **[[SOL]]** — the love-current the rescue moves toward; the sincere song Lucius overrides in the video series. - **[[Another Way II Heaven]]** — the metaphysical map (*"one become two… I was still I"*); Ballerina Boy is its *lived* version. - **[[Soul Is A Star]]** — *"do you know who you are?"* — answered autobiographically here. - **[[Loser]] / [[Good Day]] / [[No Fake Friends]]** — the 2018 protector-triad; the defense systems, mid-operation, that later crystallize into Lucius (*Loser* = shame-preemption, *"I'm a loser, baby"*). > [!note]- Advanced reading — the searching self the wound also produces (Sir Rabbit) > The wound sends out *two* figures, not one. **Ballerina Boy** is the buried *content* — the child himself, interred. **[[Sir Rabbit]]** is the searching *self* that results: identity-vacant but intact, the one who says, in effect, *"I do not know who I am, but I must be someone,"* and goes looking. The full genealogy runs **wound → buried child (Ballerina Boy) → searching rabbit ([[Sir Rabbit]]) → armor ([[Sir Lucius]])**. One injury, three downstream figures, each a different stage of the same unfinished sentence. (Careful with the register: the grounded fact is Roy's own rabbit self-identification; that Sir Rabbit *is* the Roy-pole seeker is a strong read, not a claim.) > [!note]- Advanced reading — the moon, and why this song corrects any flat anti-Lucius take > The outro's *"the moon reminds us that even in the darkness there is light"* may be the most load-bearing symbolic line in the catalogue. The moon reflects rather than generates — the **Yesod** signature (moon, dream, memory, reflection, the threshold between the material world and the higher spheres) — which reframes [[Sir Lucius]], who is strongly lunar. He is *not simply darkness* but **reflected light under distortion**: lit by fear, shame and the algorithm he reflects those (viral, dominating); lit by source-light — the heart, [[SOL]], the blessing — he could become reminder, witness, relay. *He is the moon trying to become a sun.* That's his tragedy, and the reason this song stands as a correction to any flat anti-Lucius reading. (Bookkeeping honesty: a later re-mapping in this guide reassigns the moon's *theology* to Mary and its *position* to Roy; the older "Lucius = moon" frame is flagged as superseded there, but the essay layer still carries it, and it remains the cleanest way to hear *this* line.) > [!note]- Advanced reading — the esoteric registers (framework, not authorial intent) > The song sits cleanly inside several traditions Roy openly studies. These are correspondences, not claims about what the song "means" — and the simple reading (a sincere trauma-confessional needing no mythology) is valid and sufficient on its own. > > - **Jungian — the Divine Child.** Ballerina Boy reads as the **Divine Child**, the true embodied self (with anima *elements*, not merely the anima). [[Sir Lucius]] is the compensatory protector; the parental/lunar voice is the witnessing **Self** that blesses. The deepest wound isn't that the child was hurt — it's that he was made *incompatible with survival*, which is what forces the psyche to manufacture Lucius. (See [[Concepts/The Protector]], [[Concepts/The Dweller on the Threshold]] for the mechanism by which a buried self accretes a guardian.) > - **Gnostic — the spark misnamed.** *"You're not a real boy"* is demiurgic language: a false authority telling the soul its lived truth is invalid, training it to forget itself. The rescue is *gnosis* — remembering what was true before the world misnamed you. It rhymes with [[Soul Is A Star]]'s *"do you know who you are?"* See [[Concepts/The Sacred Truths/Gnosticism - The World as Trap]]. > - **Kabbalah — the Tree in miniature.** [[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life|The Tree]] compressed: **Malkuth** (body, school, gendered rule, humiliation) → **Yesod** (memory, the moon, the buried image) → **Tiferet** (heart, blessing, *"let your light shine"*). Trauma happens in Malkuth; the buried image *lives* in Yesod; rescue means entering the lunar memory-realm without being consumed by it, pointing up toward the solar heart. The *"let your light shine"* keyword-cluster (shine, light, born-to) is the same Tiferet/solar vocabulary [[Weirdness]] later develops (*"all my weirdness is my sunshine"*). > - **The loop becomes a circle.** Adult Roy returns for child Roy — while the child was *already* being held, in the outro, by a future-self / divine voice. The recursion stops being a trap and becomes a developmental circle. See [[Concepts/The Loop and the Circle]]. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the Pinocchio analogue (Roy-curated, held loosely) > *Pinocchio* sits on [[Concepts/The I'm 33 Board|Roy's own board of films]] where he says the pattern shows up — which makes it a **Roy-curated** mythic rhyme, not a critic's import. It gathers all three grounded elements at once: a *made boy* told he is not a *real boy*; a figure defined by *the string* tying him to his maker (→ [[The Circle]]'s *"a world tied on a string"* / *"she once held the string"*); and a *feminine voice* that confers realness (the Blue Fairy ↔ the motherly outro, held as the [[Mary]]-function in strict structural rhyme). Discipline matters: the wound is *also* literal autobiography — the myth coexists, it doesn't replace, and the claim is **not** "Ballerina Boy is about Pinocchio." (The string-inversion — *I've Got No Strings* selling severance-from-the-maker as freedom, where the Circle inverts it to *remembering* the held string — lives mainly on [[Concepts/Inversion]]. Related curios — Pleasure Island → [[Bananas]], Stromboli as the exploiter/[[Concepts/The Circus|Circus]] pole — are demoted, not load-bearing.) ## Lyrics ``` I know it's not simple I know it's not fair There's nobody else like you Out there When I was 7 went to Christian school and did ballet I loved to dance I came alive when I was on that stage Until the rumors started Teacher called my dad We think your son is gay I overheard cause he was mad I thought to myself Gay must mean bad or else they wouldn't call I prayed to God to make me good cause it wasn't my fault I was the only boy in class Stood back against the wall The girls surrounded me and said "you're not a boy at all" You're not a real boy You're not a real boy You're not a real boy You're not a real boy I went home crying asked my dad if what they said was true He looked me in the eyes and said "there's nothing wrong with you, my son" I know it's not simple I know it's not fair There's nobody else like you Out there I know it's not easy It's hard when you care There's nobody else like you Out there I never danced again I killed that ballerina boy I buried him inside It's like I didn't have a choice 17 started a band and I was on a mission I said no one understands me but you always listen Felt like I could disappear and no one else would notice But you always had my back when I was feeling hopeless (I was feeling hopeless) Driving 'round the country Couldn't afford an egg McMuffin Music just wasn't landing, I heard You're not a real boy You're not a real boy What makes a real boy? I was faced with a choice Do I kill myself or come back for that kid I let go This song's for Ballerina boy This song's a prayer for hope Cause I know I know it's not simple I know it's not fair There's nobody else like you Out there I know it's not easy It's hard when you care There's nobody else like you Out there Out there (Nobody else like you) Out there (Nobody else like you) Out there (Nobody else like you) Out there Out there (Nobody else like you) We don't really know who we are until we try things And something clicks inside And says "this is me" You are one of a kind, God's design So my son, let your light shine And on those dark nights Look up to the sky The moon reminds us that even in the darkness There is light There's no one else like you Out there ``` ## Source notes - **Grounded (autobiography & release).** The ballet wound is real and publicly told by Roy — triple-confirmed across the lyric, a filmed interview (the only-boy dance class, the taunt, coming home crying, the adult dance videos as shadow-work), and an independent venue artist bio noting childhood ballet. Released June 13 2025 (Big Loud Rock, under license to Mercury Records / UMG); a 3-track single plus a same-day Dolby Atmos mix; kept off *[[Lucius Lullaby (album)|Lucius Lullaby]]*. Sole writer Roy English; produced, vocal-produced and string-arranged by Jagwar Twin. All lyric excerpts above are short — full lyrics via [Genius](https://genius.com) and streaming. - **Grounded (Lucius's investment).** That Lucius targets *this* song by name in the video series — *"your lowest-performing song… Ballerina Boy. When you're vulnerable you LOSE!"* — is on the record. It supports, without proving, the reading that the burial produced him. - **Strong readings.** That Ballerina Boy is the system's origin/light; that the burial *generated* the protector; that the two blessings are unequal; that the feminine voice landing at the wound is the thesis; that the childhood chant and the industry chant are one mechanism — anchored in the lyric and the visual lore, but interpretation, not stated outright by the work. - **Framework / esoteric (never authorial intent).** The Jungian Divine Child, the Gnostic misnaming, the Kabbalistic Malkuth→Yesod→Tiferet ascent, the moon-as-reflected-light, and the Roy-curated Pinocchio analogue are correspondences drawn from traditions Roy openly studies — resonance, not the song's stated meaning. - **Open questions.** *Why* it was kept off the album isn't publicly stated. *Who* sings the outro isn't credited (present her as "a motherly female voice," not a named performer). What the other two tracks on the 3-track release are isn't yet pinned. And the song presses one question on itself: it states the burial outright, yet the adult is plainly a stage creature and *"come back for that kid I let go"* admits the burial was incomplete — so the child may have been *misidentified* (kept alive as performance, denied recognition as that child) rather than fully buried. A legitimate question, held open rather than asserted, since holding it means treating *"I killed… I buried"* as partly unreliable and leans on biographical inference about a living artist. ## Read next - [[Ballerina Boy]] — the buried child as a figure, read across the whole cast. - [[Roy]] — the man this child belongs to, and the one deciding whether to go back for him. - [[Sir Lucius]] — the armor built over the grave, and why he mocks this song. - [[Weirdness]] — the healing pair; the clearest statement that one light split in two. - [[Mary]] — the blessing voice of the outro; *"you were born to shine."* - [[Not Your Homie]] — the shadow's answer to the same wound: *you don't know me.*