This Love (TV)
Hidden message
Timing is a funny thing
Encoded in the album’s liner notes.
“Your smile, my ghost, I fell to my knees”
The beloved's smile returns as a ghost, the remembered face that brings the speaker to her knees and runs through the song's haunting.
“This love is alive back from the dead”
Love itself performs the resurrection. Unlike the defiant LWYMMD usage, this instance is triumphant and tender, the return from the dead is redemptive rather than combative. Connects to the 1989-era treatment of love as elemental and beyond ordinary mortality.
“Clear blue water, high tide came and brought you in”
The first of two tidal moves in the song's central conceit. The relationship is figured as oceanic: the partner brought in by rising water, the speaker the shore. Sea rather than freshwater because the song commits to scale, currents, distance, love-as-ocean working at the level of weather.
“Skies grew darker, currents swept you out again”
The matched second tidal beat. The partner is taken back by the same water that delivered them, and the loss is figured as natural process rather than rupture. The cleanest instance in the catalogue of sea-as-rhythm, love subject to cycles the speaker doesn't author.
“Your smile, my ghost, I fell to my knees”
Falling to her knees is the involuntary kind of kneeling, the body buckling under a love that returns like a ghost. Nothing is chosen here: she is knocked down by the memory rather than lowering herself on purpose.
“Skies grew darker, currents swept you out again”
The sky darkens at the moment the love is taken back out, so the weather times the loss. The darkening does the telling before the current is named.
wildest dreams within
“In silent screams In wildest dreams I never dreamed of this”
“Wildest Dreams” — Wildest Dreams
This Love works the title of Wildest Dreams into a song on the same record. The distinctive two-word phrase turning up intact in a sister track reads as a quiet internal nod.
water as the lover's coming and going
“Clear blue water, high tide came and brought you in ... Skies grew darker, currents swept you out again”
“Rain came pouring down When I was drownin', that's when I could finally breathe” — Clean
Picked up by community readers as a sister song through their shared water imagery. This Love tracks the relationship as a tide that brings the lover in and sweeps him out again, the ebb and flow of a back-and-forth; Clean turns the same water into the flood that finally carries him away for good, the drowning that lets her breathe.
a flickering light as the absent lover's lingering presence
“Lantern, burning / Flickered in my mind for only you / But you were still gone, gone, gone”
“Chandelier's still flickering here” — Death by a Thousand Cuts
A community reading pairs the chandelier that keeps flickering in the abandoned house with the earlier lantern that flickered in the speaker's mind for an absent lover: in both a small wavering light stands in for a presence that has gone but will not fully go out.
the burning lantern, the porch light kept on
“Lantern, burning, flickered in the night, only you”
“I knew you'd miss me once the thrill expired, and you'd be standin' in my front porch light” — cardigan
This Love keeps a lantern burning and flickering through the night for someone gone. cardigan answers with the front porch light left on, the same vigil kept for a love expected to come back once the thrill wears off.
the lamp left burning
“Lantern, burning, flickered in the night, only you”
“And I won't confess that I waited, but I let the lamp burn” — Peter
This Love sets a lantern burning in the dark for the one who is gone. Peter keeps the same flame, letting the lamp burn for the boy who never came home.
love-that-returns
“This love came back to me”
“I watched you drive around the bend” — I Knew It, I Knew You
A community reader notes the shared return-after-departure register: both songs track a love that leaves and comes back of its own accord, the watched departure in one answered by the returning love of the other.