How Did It End?

“My beloved ghost and me, sitting in a tree, D-Y-I-N-G”

One of Taylor's most explicit ghost images — the ghost as intimate companion, the childhood spelling game turned gothic elegy. The gallows-humour register (sitting in a tree, D-Y-I-N-G) sharpens the Gothic absurdity: love as a shared dying, tender and morbid simultaneously.

Grief for the end of a relationship processed through the eyes of those outside it — the speaker imagines the questions strangers and friends will ask about what happened. Loss made public and social as well as private. The grief is doubled: mourning the relationship and mourning its aftermath in the world.