#dee.txt

Thinking about the line “you turned me into an idea of sorts” makes me think of Mitski’s second verse in “Last Words of a Shooting Star”:

You wouldn't leave 'til we loved in the morning You'd learned from movies how love ought to be And you'd say you love me and look in my eyes But I know through mine, you were looking in yours

Interestingly, while in the Mitski song, the speaker’s lover is turning her into an idea with seemingly positive intentions, “you said some things that I can’t unabsorb” suggests the ex-love in chloe et al is using the speaker to justify their own bad behaviors.

If we take the drugs line literally, unfortunately, I know first-hand that it’s very common for addicts in active relapse to blame literally everyone else for their problems, no matter how thin the justification. This would tie the song back into songs like Renegade— “is it really your anxiety that stops you from giving me everything, or do you just not want to?”

Of course, you don’t have to be an addict to blame other people for your problems, but that reading is being openly invited, I’d say.

If we go back to Mitski, we can think of a song like “Dead Women”:

Would you have liked me better if I'd died So you could tell my story the way it ought to be? You'd find my parents and ask to see my things Rifle through it all, fill the blanks with what you need

If the ex-love wants not the real woman, but an “idea,” why does she even need to be alive? If she’s dead, she can be any idea he wants.

5. What do you think is the significance of the assumed/assigned genders of the names in the song title?

Now this is an interestingly question—of course, of “chloe or sam or sophia or marcus,” only the latter immediately reads as a masculine name. On a first listen, this immediately destabilizes the listener and the assumed heterosexuality of the story. It also raises far more questions than answers—if Marcus is a man, which many would safely assume, is Sam one as well? What is the ex’s sexuality? Was the ex’s sexuality a point of contention in the relationship? We don’t get these answers, which immediately sets us up to know that we will probably never get to the truth, similar to how the speaker herself (if we assume the speaker is a woman like Taylor) is forever left wondering.