Taylor floated over Philadelphia in a serpentine, skeletal carriage. Her head sat below the snake's, and a thin wire wrapped her waist and its spine and held her. Below, a spangle of rubber wristbands pulsed, an LED sea rising tide-like at stadium's edge.
"You are in love," she sang, the crowd with her. And the song continued, and the carriage continued and neared the bowl of bodies northmost edge. The bridge came:
"Now you know why they lost their minds and fought the wars, and why I've spent my life trying to put into words."
And you know, if you were there, that she had finally succeeded. And she knew too and, knowing this, undid a clasp and leaned.
That Taylor fell, you know, that she died, you know; you don't know what she thought descending. In the shadow between desire and spasm, motion and act, fall and splat of what did she think? Of whom?
Ursula K. LeGuin, her last love, the muse of Big Machine records' record breaker. Though Taylor was a singer who could talk of songs as slogans, of albums as widgets, and of fanaticism as inelastic demand, who could publish through the Wall Street Journal as well as Universal, she was, behind it all, compelled to write by nothing more than love as new romance.
And romance it was, between them. They had met on a Massachusetts bench, riverside. Ursula appeared as Taylor's lost future and Taylor as Ursula's spent past. A look, a joke, a laugh, a nudge: lyricists in love.
Falling though, Taylor didn't think of meeting, or of parting the January prior. She didn't think of the midnight drives with their almost-missed stoplights and star-filled sunroofs, belted choruses, and wind whipped faces, twirling hair, or of sunset beaches with their sun worn skin and bodies current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of the ocean, or of after-rain parking lots, or of dresses removed, or of getting lost, or of sleeping in. She thought of an open fridge, its light spilling, a speaker softly playing, and an apartment's linoleum squeaking under bare feet and if you had had the right blind up and had seen into the right window in the right, big, old city you would say you saw two girls dancing.