happiness
Mash-ups & Live Pairings
- We Were Happy (TV) / happiness (Eras Tour, Hamburg)
Details
- Stated inspiration
- From the Evermore prologue: "The realization that maybe the only path to healing is to wish happiness on the one who took it away from you."
The grief of a relationship ending even when it was not all bad, the speaker cannot produce the clean anger that would make leaving easier. The song mourns the good parts of something that had to end: grief as the inability to hate someone who hurt you.
“Tell me, when did your winning smile begin to look like a smirk?”
The winning smile sours into a smirk, the same expression curdling as the marriage turns.
“Haunted by the look in my eyes”
What haunts her is her own face, the one that would have loved him for a lifetime. The refrain keeps the new her unmet, so the haunting sits between a self whose future is gone and one not yet arrived.
“But now my eyes leak acid rain on the pillow where you used to lay your head”
Rain turns corrosive in the aftermath of grief. The speaker's weeping becomes acid rain on the pillow, the weather darkened into something that burns where it falls.
“The price I paid for seven years in heaven”
The good years of the marriage are counted as seven years in heaven, paradise now reckoned as something paid for in the loss that followed.
“I was dancing when the music stopped”
The dance caught mid-step by the music's end, the song's image for being undone by a relationship ending. The line locates the breakup in the body's continued motion past the song's cue; the dance carries on for a beat into the silence, a small late betrayal of the moment that has already ended.
“I hope she’ll be a beautiful fool, who takes my spot next to you”
The line “I hope she’ll be a beautiful fool, who takes my spot next to you” echoes Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, who hopes her infant daughter will grow up “a beautiful little fool”, the best thing she believes a girl can be in a world that punishes women for seeing clearly. Taylor turns Daisy’s resigned wish into the narrator’s bitter blessing on the woman who will replace her.
the same endearment, the same distance
“Honey, when I'm above the trees, I see this for what it is”
“I can see you standing, honey” — exile
Sets exile's distance as the condition for clarity against happiness's 'above the trees', with both songs reaching for the same endearment to make the point. States the reading the YouTube voices only gesture toward.
absorbed-in-the-trees
“Honey, when I'm above the trees I see this for what it is”
“Please picture me in the trees” — seven
Community readings set the two lines against each other as opposite positions on the same image. seven asks to be seen inside the trees, where detail is everything and perspective is unavailable; the later song climbs above them to gain exactly the clarity the first refuses, and finds it costs something. One is a request to be remembered without perspective, the other an admission that perspective arrives whether or not it is wanted. The pairing also sharpens the poem's own second invitation, since being in the weeds is the same condition described in plainer terms.
intimacy turned weapon
“When did all our lessons start to look like weapons”
“You knew the password so I let you in the door” — hoax
Intimacy read as access: what the lover was let in to learn becomes what he later aims at the deepest hurt.
Socialite at the centre of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.