carrot

First, the obvious- in “If I Leave,” Mitski sings, “I ride through a tunnel and it's dark the whole way. I ride through a tunnel, it's been dark the whole way. I ride through a tunnel, it's still dark the whole way."

This immediately jumped out to me as a darker and more despairing twist on I Will's "We're not out of the tunnel. I'll bet you, though, there's an end."

In I Will, Mitski and her lover see an end to the darkness. If I Leave has a lot more pessimism to it. She's in the tunnel and it is dark, it's been dark, it's still dark.

But the parallels go further. Just a line before the tunnel stanza in If I Leave, Mitski says:

"Only you know. I've let only you know how I ride through a tunnel..."

In If I Leave, Mitski's lover is the only person who has ever known the depths of her darkness, whatever that darkness looks like. ("No one on this street knows, no one in this mall knows, no one in this bar knows. None of my friends know, surely, none of my colleagues, nor do my family...")

It's the same secrecy promised by the narrator of I Will, who says, "All the quiet nights you bear/Seal them up with care/No one needs to know they're there/For I will hold them for you."

Add in the context that Mitski wrote I Will as a manifestation of all the things she wished somebody would say to her (or as a love song to herself, full of things she needed to hear), and you're left with a heartbreaking picture. I Will sees Mitski dreaming of a love that would see her at her most vulnerable and still stay: "I will see your body bare, and still I will live here."

She found that love, but now, in If I Leave, she's pondering the end of it. She says, "If I leave, somebody else will find you. But nobody else could see me quite as clearly as you." Nobody else will understand what haunts her as much as this person, who she might lose.