[Intro - low menacing figure]

[Verse 1 - quiet, dangerous]
He didn't raise his voice
He didn't raise a hand
He made a two-word phone call
Like a reasonable man
Twenty minutes later
Two men and cardboard came
And everything I ever loved
Went out in a garbage bag with no name

[Pre-Chorus]
The couch I picked, the pictures
The dishes and the phone
Every stitch out of the closet
Every seed I'd ever sown

[Chorus - explosive, hurt under the anger]
Trash bags going down the stairs
Three years in a plastic skin
You came to me with nothing, girl
You leave the way you came in
He kept the lease, he kept the lamps
He kept the snow globe snow
He wanted me to learn it deep
That everything I was, was owed

[Verse 2 - seething]
I asked him for my clothes
Just something I could wear
He smiled the smile he saves
For teaching girls despair
Those are mine too, sweetheart
That's how the lesson goes
He branded me with nothing
So I'd remember whom he owns

[Chorus]
Trash bags going down the stairs
A life in single file
He took the walls, he took the warm
He took the wardrobe and the style
He stood there in my doorway
Like the closing of a claim
He took everything that money buys
And he thought that was the game

[Verse 3 - bass alone, defiant]
But hear me now, I did the math
A hundred times since then
He repossessed the inventory
Down to the bobby pins
He emptied every drawer I had
Except the one he never found
There was one drawer he couldn't lift
One thing he couldn't pound

[Bridge - whisper building to biggest hit]
You can't take
What was never for sale
You can't take
What never had a tag
The girl was not the furniture
The girl was not the bag
You took it all, you took it clean
You took the whole disguise
And what was left stood in the rain
And got recognized

[Final Chorus - triumphant flip]
Trash bags going down the stairs
And me, I'm going free
You said I'd leave with nothing
But the nothing, that was me
And the nothing walked to Hartley Park
And the nothing got a name
You kept three years of furniture
I never was your things
I never was your things

[Outro - one bass note hanging]
Count it all again, Mason
It was never me you owned