Why can't I stop listening to Taylor Swift and crying?

I said remember this moment...

For as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been trying to remember. I started doing it when I was just a little kid, in the smallest of moments. Not milestones or birthdays or vacations, but during insignificant stretches of time. I can still recall sitting in the backseat of the car on a long road trip and staring at droplets of water on the window for hours, watching them slowly roll down the glass and disappear into each other. Remember, remember, remember, I said in my brain. It’s possible that this started as a childish, slightly strange game to pass the time, but something about it always felt important. Useful. Every time, I would picture myself in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years and wonder if I’d still be able to think of this exact moment then, if it would stick around despite the passage of time. If I would be that much more capable of accessing the memory because I’d taken the time to really focus on it, to build it, to bury it into myself. It was like I was stretching a muscle, testing myself, holding on to a version of myself and life I knew would soon be gone.

As I got older, I kept up the habit, though it became all at once easier and harder to do it. I’d forget to. Or be distracted. Or dismiss it as silly. I’d save it for the biggest moments, instead of the small stuff. Still, I kept it up. I’d stare at a beautiful view and try to memorize colors, smells, sounds. I’d literally hold my pointer finger and thumb up and frame it, take a snapshot in my head. Always, I’d wonder if I’d one day only be able to recall it because I had taken the time to say the words, to repeat them out loud or in my head: Remember, remember, remember.

Now, at 30, I can’t say for sure that it worked every time (after all, I wouldn’t exactly remember if it hadn’t), but I can say that every few months, I find myself seeing or hearing or doing something that seems to pull on a very particular thread in my brain. It’s like a tiny bell goes off, and I somehow know that years ago I sat somewhere and told myself to remember. It happens at gas stations and libraries and when staring at the ocean. On planes and in move theaters. It’s often hard for me to recall the specifics, to name what moment or view exactly I was so desperate to hold onto, but I find the details don’t really matter. Each time, I’m struck with a sense of gratitude for that other version of me. For the fact that she thought I’d want to go back in time one day. For trusting that I’d still care as much at 30 as I did at 15.

As it turns out, 30-year-old has a lot in common with 15-year-old me, actually. We’re still moody and emotional. Dreamy and sensitive. If we’re being honest, we still think we’re hilarious. Ah, and, of course: We both still love Taylor Swift. At 15, I’d play “Love Story” 25 times in a row, a completely fabricated love story of my own playing out in my head. At 17, when Speak Now came out, I’d listen again and again, the songs making their way through my newfound, steadfast dedication to listening to only bearded, perpetually sad-sounding indie musicians with indecipherable tattoos. And at 19, while studying abroad, I listened to “All Too Well” for the first time, starting it over again before the song even ended, determined to learn the lyrics, to think of a situation in my life that the words matched up with (I was 19, so it wasn’t hard). Desperate be part of it. Fast forward a few years, and I can tell you about more moments: Listening to Folklore on the floor of my Philadelphia row home in July 2020, feeling distinctly like the world would never, ever be the way it was again, grateful to have music that made me think about something else for the first time in months. Sitting on a porch in Asheville the next year, listening to the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” at dawn, burnt orange leaves all around me, laughing into a cup of coffee at the new lyrics, delighted.

At any given time, though, I would have told you that I wasn’t a true Swiftie. I wasn’t in that exclusive tip top tier of fandom. There were still lyrics I didn’t know by heart. Vault tracks I hadn’t heard of. Years I listened more than others. Albums I didn’t play as often. I had never been to a concert, or gotten a tattoo of a lyric, or spent more than a few minutes obsessing over Easter eggs. I was always a fan, yes, but I wasn’t on the level of some other people I knew. And yet, looking back on every year of my life, every phase and moment and change, there’s me, and there’s Taylor Swift.

And maybe this is why this week, for whatever reason, I can’t stop listening to her music without crying. I can’t watch this clip of “Long Live” without tearing up. Can’t sing it in the car without my voice cracking. Can’t think of being in a stadium with 76,000 people and her on Friday, all singing these songs together, without goosebumps rising up my arm or a lump forming in my throat. When I sat down today to work on this essay, I didn’t intend to write about this. But as I was driving home from the gym this morning listening to “Long Live,” I couldn’t stop thinking about where this emotion is coming from. I’ve been a fan for a long time, yes, but never so much so that I imagined that the idea of going to a concert would do this to me. Why couldn’t I stop crying? What the heck was happening here? And then I listened again, hitting the back button before the song had even ended, same as I did when I was a teenager: I said remember this moment, in the back of my mind. And then I knew.

All my life, I’ve been trying to hold on. Even when I was 15 and hated most things about myself, when I so desperately wanted to be older, beautiful, loved — even then, there was something in me that said to remember. Something that told me that one day I would want to know 15-year-old me. To recall what it felt like to drive by myself for the first time, or daydream about someone. To pine over someone at 17 or break up with someone at 19 or flail through my 20s. All these years, I thought that it was all up to me. That if I really wanted to remember, I had to tell myself exactly that all the time: Remember, remember, remember. No one else could do that but me, I thought. But now, at 30, I realize that maybe I wasn’t ever as alone in this as I thought. That maybe this is exactly why I feel the same gratitude and emotion toward Taylor Swift as I do toward little me staring at raindrops in the backseat of a car. We’re so far apart, but every now and then she’s right there, pulling at a thread in my brain, ringing a tiny bell. It’s a little like magic, but it’s not that complicated, either: She helps me remember.

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