[Verse 1]
She carries whole worlds in the space between her words,
A mind like open water, catching everything she's heard,
Two currents running through her — quick and still and deep,
The face she shows the room, the ocean that she keeps,
She reads the heart of others like a language she was born to speak,
And tends to every living thing while softly going unseen.

[PreChorus]
But the one who holds the lantern for the rest
Deserves to lay that lantern down and finally rest.

[Chorus]
Joyce, you are the tide and the shore,
Every scar you carry is a door,
You don't have to earn the right to bloom —
The cosmos wrote you carefully, there's nothing left to prove.

[Verse 2]
She loves the way old roots love stone — slow, sure, and true,
She gives before she's asked and asks for nothing overdue,
But she has dreamed of love that's clear as morning, clean as rain,
And sometimes built her shelter out of hoping not to feel the pain,
There's a wound she tends in quiet where the longing used to live —
That wound became the reason she has so much left to give.

[PreChorus]
The heart that's been through fire doesn't burn,
It learns the shape of warmth at every turn.

[Chorus]
Joyce, you are the tide and the shore,
Every scar you carry is a door,
You don't have to earn the right to bloom —
The cosmos wrote you carefully, there's nothing left to prove.

[Verse 3]
She's built her worth with steady hands and slow-ascending grace,
A quiet kind of power that takes its time to find its place,
The world needs what she carries — that rare gift of making whole,
Of seeing what is broken and responding from the soul,
She once believed belonging was a prize she had to win —
But she was never on the outside, it was always her they needed in.

[PreChorus]
The light she kept for others has always been her own,
And every road she's walked has led her home.

[Chorus]
Joyce, you are the tide and the shore,
Every scar you carry is a door,
You don't have to earn the right to bloom —
The cosmos wrote you carefully, there's nothing left to prove.

[Bridge]
The moon knew what it was doing when it marked her,
The stars were not accidental, nothing scattered,
She is held in something wider than she's known —
And she has never, not for one breath, been alone.

[Outro]
Joyce, let the tide come in,
Let it wash away the weight of where you've been,
You are guided, you are rooted, you are found —
You were always, always sacred ground.