Dating : A Taylor Swift Love Story

There are so many albums that I can listen to that take me right back to where I was when I listen to it. What I was going through, the exact place I was when I first played it and all the emotions of that time in my life.

Damien Rice’s first album was in Cardiff, Wales sitting at the train station with my now ex-wife. David Gray’s first album with ‘Babylon’ was in my Sony Discman with anti-skip on as I walked the streets of Chicago for the first time when I was nineteen. U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind was sitting in my very first office when I was an intern at the church (doesn’t just feel like a lifetime ago, but another life) and I jammed that album out much to the annoyance of everyone around me. I think the closest person to my age was 20 years older. I remember my first CD I got in my first car. I had just gotten a CD player installed in my new Mazda pickup truck and I while I waited for the installation I carefully choose which would be the first to fill the empty space. So I choose Natalie Imbruglia’s Left of the Middle, mostly because I thought she was hot as hell (and still do) and it turned out to be an incredible album, beyond the big ‘Torn’ single.

“I want to drive away with you
I want your complications too
I want your dreary Mondays
Wrap your arms around me, baby boy”

About a year ago I remember being where it all started. The gym. Sharing looks after being together for a short time, sharing our favorites from Taylor Swift’s new album Lover.

Rewind a month or two. She was the hot girl on the bike that I admired from afar for 6 months. One day I forced myself to not leave without talking to her. I got her name, but the eye contact stopped for the next since months. Fast forward to Pensacola, Florida visiting good friends who were sitting at the dining table with drinks, with a topic that bored me out of my mind. Church. I pulled out the Hinge app, that I had tried to deactivate earlier that week, and the first thing I see if a message from that girl. No fucking way.

A few days later we were sitting across each other on the rooftop of El Alma. From there I fell hard for her. I always felt like everyone around me wished they were me. She was never really an option. I had talked to her just to make myself proud. But here she was.

About a year went by. It was filled with beauty, confusion, growth and me learning about what I want and need in a relationship. As fucking great as it was at times, it also fucking broke me.

“I knew you’d linger like a tattoo kiss. I knew you’d haunt all of my what-if’s”

Fast forward to Taylor Swift’s surprise album Folklore. I gave all of myself to that relationship. So it shouldn’t have surprised me that when it ended, I felt like a huge part of me was gone. All those little things. That was the hardest, still the hardest, to say goodbye to. So, as I drove around California listening to Taylor Swift’s new album, I think of the long drives of 4–6 hours to our next destination where I knew it was ending. The song Exile soon became my anthem.