In case you live under a rock: Taylor Swift released her new album, Lover, last week and I’ve listened to it on repeat and have been loving everything that Lover has to offer ever since. It’s her comeback album and maybe her best one yet. From forgetting that the Reputation era even existed, to dissing a few more exes, to finally finding true love, she even opens up about her mom’s battle with cancer – the highs and lows are heartbreaking and harrowing, but through it all she chooses to walk in the daylight and after listening to her lyrical diary-dump, I wanted to do one of my own, so I could stand in the light too.
The album starts with I Forgot That You Existed – a bumping beat about Calvin Harris? Kanye West? or maybe the Reputation era in general, I forgot that you existed, and I thought that it would kill me but it didn’t…it isn’t love, it isn’t hate, it’s just indifference the songbird sings as she giggles and satires – the ultimate power move, she’s not hung up on her past, she just like decided to forget about it instead. My favorite line comes when the pop star sings, taught me some hard lessons, I just forget what they were, it’s all just a blur, so in honor of Taylor forgetting whatever she needed to forget, I decided to write about what it felt like to forget someone too…
On occasion I’d see a red Jeep and think of you, I remember that summer I was broken, heart broken about you – so blue.
For the longest time I couldn’t drive by that coffee shop, without feeling embarrassed about that night that I begged for your love.
Those cuts were so deep I thought I’d never be happy, but after dating you, I became the best version of me.
I wanted you to feel sorry for me at first, but really I feel sorry for you because you never met tequila-shot Stephanie, and for you that’s just the absolute worst.
You were my first time: that must’ve been nice – except those were some messy, rhythmless July nights;
You shared a bed with me before I was smooth, before I learned all those other moves – but sometimes I win and you lose.
And I still think that if I saw you in a coffee shop I’d wave hi, giggle, while blushing thinking about those July nights, but then I’d wave goodbye and continue to live my you-less life.
Lover is an album filled with love ballads and the best bit is that Taylor isn’t 15 anymore: she’s not singing about Romeo and Juliet, she’s not waiting on a prince with a white horse, she’s singing about real, beautiful, but also complicated, sometimes confusing love. In Cornelia Street she sings, I thought you were leading me on, I packed my bags, left Cornelia Street, before you even knew I was gone, but then the phone rings and Taylor sings that she went back to Cornelia Street, where she belonged. For the longest time, I thought love had to be perfect, that love stories didn’t have fights or missteps, or hurt hearts, and finding my big love made me realize sometimes love can be a big beautiful mess.
After five years, I’m still thinking about those nights we made out in my car, the night you had to carry me home from the bar.
I’m thinking about us laughing as you begged to take my pants off, who knew it would lead to real love.
It was Thanksgiving and I’d barely seen you, when we finally saw each other, you couldn’t wait to tell me, “I love you.”
It wasn’t all easy, my heart had been broken and I was so unsure, so scared, so insecure.
And I accused you of cheating or leaving or both, because before I loved you that was all I had known.
I was scared to be more than friends, and I think it’s because I knew it then. I saw the beginning and the middle, but never an end.
You took me to see Christmas lights near where you grew up. And in that twinkle light driveway, I didn’t want the night to end, I asked you if we could make the circle again and again.
You drove me home and made a u-turn in a cul-de-sac where you used to ride your bike with your friends. And I kept falling in love over again.
And I know every time you say I love you, I say “you dooo?” But I know that you’re the only one who ever said it and it was true, besides, we both know you think it’s kinda cute.
The song on Lover that left me feeling the most, left me feeling broken, but for the first time not alone was Soon You’ll Get Better, a song Taylor wrote about her mom’s battle with cancer. Taylor sings, And I hate to make this all about me, but who am I supposed to talk to? What am I supposed to do? If there’s no you? If you don’t know, my dad was diagnosed with a terminal illness nearly two years ago, and it’s been the hardest two years of my life and to feel like someone wrote a song having felt all the things I’ve felt made me feel so heard, so seen.
I convince myself that incurable is just a word. That all this, it’s too absurd; that if there was ever a cure, you and me, we deserve a little more time, a story with a million words.
And I’m just like you because I believe in English and history; they were my religion, but now – my misery.
I pray to math and science that there’ll be a way to fix you because I already miss you.
And it hurts me more because I have to miss you twice. There’s the you I hear in my dreams, that I talk to, asleep at night: the old you.
And there’s the you in your hospital bed, the you with lifeless eyes: the new you, the you I don’t recognize.
And I look through orange bottles of riluzole and sertraline and lorazepam, orange colored glasses at the pharmacy. The lady handing them to me, she’s so nice to me;
her eyes say I’m sorry for your loss. But, our love and hope and prayers for a cure are lost on her. Because I come home to you and you smile as I dance in the living room,
I sing the song from the commercial for your favorite car, and even though we don’t have much time left, the end still feels so far.
And I know you won’t get better, but we make the best of what we’ve got and the time is fleeting, I know it’s not a lot.
It’s getting harder for you to breathe and my teary eyes make it hard for me to see; and I feel so conflicted to think about me,
but I hate that we’re getting so close to the end, because I don’t know how I can live to lose my best friend.
Hudson Valley Dog Mom 
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