Lyric

We were just a crowd of friends

No one knew about you and me

N the middle of the noisy classroom

You would glance and I would see

“Let’s meet up at The Place”

Yped like some secret code

Even though nobody was reading

There was one old chair by an old apartment

Peeling paint, a rusted gate

You would sit and light your cigarette

Like you could not stand to wait

You passed the smoke between your fingers

I took one just to feel grown

Did not know that every inhale

Was you writing in my bones

We called it

“The Place”

In messages no one else would read

After-class secrets on that chair on that hidden street

The last time that you kissed me

I did not know I would miss

The flavor of your cigarette

Then we graduated slowly

Into futures not the same

Different campuses and cities

Different circles, different names

You became the one I messaged

When some new boy broke my pride

You would ask me how I’m doing

Hide your own heart off to the side

Now you say you have a girlfriend

And I say I am happy too

If I asked to really see you

That would be disrespectful to her and you

I went back there on my own

To that backstreet, to that apartment

But a brand-new building stood there

Where our chair had left its trace

We called it

“The Place”

In messages no one else would read

After-class secrets on that chair on that hidden street

Backstreet chair and crumbling walls were all we’d ever need

Every stolen after-class minute, every cigarette we traced

Two years of my first love were folded in the place we thought no one else knew

The last time you kissed me

I did not know I would miss

The flavor of your cigarette

We still talk about our lovers

Like two friends from another time

But my first forbidden story

Starts and ends at

“The Place”

There will always be a place inside my heart

Where a part of you still stays

I hope inside your heart there is a room

That remembers us too

My first love still gently stays

In the flavor of your cigarette