Why Can’t I Stop Crying After Listening to Love Story (Taylor’s Version) for the First Time?

I am 26 years old.

In my life, I have known darkness and suffering and hurt and grief and heartache. I have met them time and time again. I have a feeling they will not be leaving any time soon. I also know pain, and debt, and leech-like anxiety that clings past the very bone of you—taking more than blood; it eats joy.

I have met terror and evil and malice and greed, and as such I have met the fear and the anger it breeds in your blood, and the spite that comes with it, tags along, and all of these things, all of them — they rest inside of you in a single weight, in ways I thought only war-worn heroes and poets could carry.

I was in bed, reading, while this weight settled onto the middle of me in the way summer creeps from cold, cold winter: without warning, and you spend your days in the warmth wondering if it had ever been cold at all. The weight of all this life becomes a simple ball and chain that I carry, that we all carry, and it is tied to the soul, the self, and the weight of it has become part of us and we never feel less of it. Sometimes, we let the weight keep us still that we cannot move for days. But we learn to move. We learn to carry it more.

We learn to run.

Then, came the music. The telltale guitar strums that a teenage Taylor Swift once imagined on her bedroom floor. It is a reclaimed melody, no longer tied to malicious, greedy weight, and it is owned now—no longer stolen. The song has come home and you know it.

Without warning, I started to cry. For the first time in a month, they are not the kind of tears that hurt.

At first, I do not understand why. It’s just a song. But the melody, as it rises, so too does the weight that I’ve nursed and raised these many years. It has grown significantly in the last month alone. Suddenly, the air comes in more freely and, Christ, the flavour settles on the tip of your tongue and it tastes like joy. You remember.

All around me, the world suddenly shifts.

I am 14 years old again and I have all of the invincibility that comes with it. I am on the same bed. But my bones remember the speed, the heart, the innocence, and, God, the lightness of being young. Suddenly, I have never known hurt and heartbreak to a degree beyond fiction. And so much of the pain before were just nightmares instead of memories.

I am 14 years old and all I am is waiting for Saturday morning cartoons, and final exams, and the excitement of going to college, and the fantasy of first, real love, and I dream. Oh, I dream of reaching somewhere and becoming something so much more beautiful than what and where I am. There were no wounds that left scars.

I am 14 years old and my grandmother is still alive, and still strong, and still standing. She is still here.

And for the first time since her funeral last month, I want to laugh. The crying doesn’t hurt this time. When I open my mouth, it isn’t to scream; it opens to sing along to words I have known for the last thirteen years —

Marry me, Juliet, you never have to be alone. I love you and that’s all I really know.

And for a few minutes, while the music plays and she sings, my heart feels full again for the first time in weeks. Tears fall down my cheeks but my chest takes in more air than I can remember it ever taking. I’m smiling, truly smiling, for the first time in weeks. And there is so much wonder in the world again, even for just a little while.

There is still so much to be afraid of. But when you’re 14, you don’t have to worry about all the things that you have to worry about when you’re about to turn 27. Nobody expects you to have you anything figured out yet.

I still have nothing figured out. I am still afraid.

But for a moment, for the length of a single song, I fear less.

Thank you, Taylor Swift.