Our story

The relationship rendered as a story to be told, controlled, or contested, with the charge falling on authorship and ownership rather than the page itself. In Taylor's writing the narrative frame repeatedly asks whose story a love becomes, who will tell it, and whether the speaker occupies it as its author or as a character inside someone else's version. The image surfaces as ambition (one day they will tell the story of us), as dispossession (begging for footnotes in the story of your life), and as completion contested at its end (the story is not mine anymore). What distinguishes this register from broader storytelling is the weight placed on ownership: not whether a story gets told beautifully, but whether the speaker owns it at all. Sibling motif to Book/Pages, which holds the physical-text register; distinct from Storytelling as a thematic study of craft and construction.

The story carries the charge of a relationship that has become a narrative asset, owned by whoever gets to tell it. For the speaker, being in a story is often not the same as controlling it: she may be the protagonist or a supporting character, the named author or the unnamed subject. The motif's deepest pressure is the gap between living through something and having it made sense of in someone else's telling.

Appears in 7 songs