A Wrinkle in Time
A Wrinkle in Time surfaces across two Taylor Swift songs, through allusion.
Appears in 2 songs
Associated with Madeleine L'Engle
“The brink of a wrinkle in time, bittersweet sixteen suddenly”
The same title is used for its original sense here, a fold that collapses the distance between two ages: standing at the brink of it, the speaker is suddenly sixteen again. Where Hits Different shrinks the wrinkle to a line on a face, this one lets it work as L'Engle intended and travels through it.
“A wrinkle in time like the crease by your eyes”
L'Engle's title names a fold in spacetime that lets travellers skip the distance between two points. The song cashes the phrase in as something physical and small: the wrinkle is a crease at the corner of someone's eyes, the mark left by years of smiling. A device for defeating time is reduced to the evidence of time passing on a face.