Walls
Walls as a barrier to feeling, the partner's refusal of closeness or vulnerability turned into something solid the speaker cannot get through. The image gives emotional distance a physical shape, a surface she can see but not cross, and it is often coloured (grey, blue) to set the mood of the barrier.
A wall is unavailability made architectural. The partner's resistance becomes a structure standing between them, something the speaker can press against but not get past, so the focus stays on being shut out rather than on the other person's reasons.
Appears in 4 songs
“Patching up the crack along the wall”
The cracked wall represents the speaker's attempt to separate from and seal over past damage, but the crack persists as a site of vulnerability where the past intrudes on the present.
“I stopped trying to make him laugh, stopped trying to drill the safe”
The safe is a metaphor for the partner's emotional closure, his heart or true feelings are locked away and the speaker has been trying unsuccessfully to break through.
“You put up walls and paint them all a shade of gray”
Walls as metaphor for the male figure's emotional resistance and refusal to allow intimacy, his barriers against the relationship, rendered in the bleak, lifeless colour grey.
“Walls of insincerity”
The walls here are not a partner's emotional barriers but the social barriers erected at a party, the false faces and empty interactions that the speaker encounters before the stranger appears. Uncle Jerry connects this to Robert Frost's 'Mending Wall' and the idea that all people build walls to protect themselves in social settings.