✨ Again And Again, Maybe 10 More Times, We Made A Promise, What Will Come Next? Will You Be Here When

From 5 holes in the fence I bring you the sequel 13 holes in the bench

🎃 Imagine this. You are walking through your yard. It's one of your favorite places, all sprawling garden rows and vibrant green grass. There are herbs for cooking and spell casting. There are daisies - so many daisies - in every shade of your rainbow. Up ahead you spot a small cropping of weeds, and set your foot on each stepping stone of the path that leads right to them. The house is a little farther now, but you are still within the confines of your tall and impenetrable fence. Nothing comes through that fence. Not now and not ever. Within it you are safe. Your lover and your fresh baked buns are safe. (The buns, of course, are in the oven turning golden as you speak. It's an old family recipe, jotted lovingly on a recipe card.) You reach the weeds and pluck a dandelion. Caught up in a moment of buoyant childlike whimsy, you make a wish and blow, blow, blow. Hundreds of featherly florets scatter. You laugh. You watch as they ride the breeze, one floret in particular. It drifts and dances like all the others, but as the wind changes direction it swoops over the fence. You lose sight of it, and send a silent apology to whoever ends up with a cropping of dandelions in their yard. Did you know that dandelions don't need to be purposefully planted all at once? All it takes is for one small seed to catch on the breeze, and by then it has spread irreversibly. You'd never know where the initial seed came from, because it has started so small and floated so far. You swallow, staring at the fence. It was you who blew the dandelion in the first place. It was you who ventured too closely to the edge of the garden. It was chance and weather that landed it where it did. You breathe in, and deep and out, expelling the growing anxiety from your body. You turn back to the house. You have those homemade buns to tend to, after all. But as you reach the door you can't help but cast a furtive glance over your shoulder, to the spot where that dandelion floret disappeared. You can never blame someone for the dandelions that sprout in your grass. It’s untraceable and irrelevant. They all come from the same place anyway: a private moment performed too near the property line. Of course the recipient would pluck the weeds so unwittingly planted. Of course they, too, would blow, blow, blow and spread the florets far and wide. Once you blow a dandelion, you never get it back. It isn’t yours anymore. 🎃

🎃 Imagine this. You wander through the woods. Deep in this Enchanted Forest, your delicate fairy wings are crippled and weak. You haven’t come this way in a long time. You’re not sure you’ll be able to find it. You trip over overgrown roots and foliage that looks suspiciously like clawing hands in the dying light. A howl sounds in the distance, pushing you closer to your destination. Watchful eyes in the birch bark feel more leering than protective. Your ripped and muddied gown is caked in dandelion fuzz. You limp over uneven ground, smiling at the pain of the shark bite with each excruciating step - replaying the satisfying splash as you finally chose her over the world. As you grabbed the enemy and dove into the infested waters. You squint to make sense of your surroundings through the fog, cherry red eyes glowing in the bushes. Just before you nearly give up, you see it ahead. The wooden door standing sovereign in the middle of the forest. Deeply cut claw marks mar its surface. Glittering flecks of what could be light filter through the crack beneath it. The best and worst part of it all - the lock lies broken, scorched, down on the ground. To put it plainly, your limits are now your own courage. Nothing more, and nothing less. All your life you have been afraid. Afraid of ghosts, shadows and raindrops on tin roofs. It is a fear that has paralyzed you. And yet, now, in the face of something actually worthy of your fear, you find peace and courage. You step forward. You place your hand on the doorknob, the metal cold against your fiery skin. Insecurity and hope pound in your ears in tune with your heart beat. Never in your wildest dreams did you actually believe you would arrive here. “Human, human, human.” The darkest parts of your mind chant. It burns like hot coals. But the longer you stand there, hand on the doorknob, the softer the voice becomes. Not softer in volume - if anything, the voice is louder now - but softer in tone. Who doesn’t love a good key change?  “Human, human, human.” It no longer sounds like the weakness it used to. It no longer sounds like a flaw. Your heart beats red and hot and furious in your chest. Isn’t that a magnificent thing! A knock sounds on the door from the other side. You smile at the signal as your feet squash the forest carpet of clovers and daisies. With the deepest exhale of your life so far, you slowly twist the handle. 🎃

🎃 Imagine this. You are on the balcony of an ice castle. Pushing and pushing against the railing, slowly trudging toward a horizon that never seems to get any closer. Smashing against the frozen structure that is so solid it feels like glass, so solid it feels like it will never break. The time draws near, springtime sunshine causing small drips and fractures. You strike a match and blow the smoke toward the structure that shelters and protects you. Suddenly, you hear a crack, a crunch, a whoosh. There is a sudden give beneath you, and you tumble through the broken, melting hole in your palace. You have FINALLY smashed through the ice castle! It was so slow, and then suddenly so all of a sudden! You'd thought it would take much longer to arrive in this moment! However, in this suddenness you find yourself still somehow underprepared, kicking yourself for the time you squandered by wallowing in the seeming endlessness of your predicament. All this time spent inching toward a finish line. No time at all spent readying for an end. Shit. In midair, you scramble for a parachute. You will reach the ground either way, whether you float like a feather or freefall like a meteor. But after all this time, you decide you'd like to land softly, rather than crash in a tangle of broken limbs and fiery shock. Dear reader, I'm sure this tale has raised a question...? Why would someone you believe to have wings need a parachute? 🎃

Here is 🎃 earlier message today.

(x)

hi ! no need to post this, just wanted to let you know that i took the time to find all the posts. in case you need them :) take care xx

so, this is gonna be their thing? 👀

Supporting her wife 😍...

This Anon was sent to @spade-riddles and it is either trying to mimic something Taylor would send or is an inside source. I am supremely annoyed either way, but I just wanna point a few things out because I can’t stop myself—which was probably the intention because we are all fucking FBI detectives with this shit

1) 🎃—JACK o lantern /pumpkin—Jack A? Halloween? October?

2) HEEL—Matt Healy 🤮

3) sparks fly—Speak Now

4) to be ready—for it?

5) 🎃—why again? Beginning and ending ?

This could all be word salad bullshit and a distraction from the dumpster 🔥

🎃 Imagine this. You are in a kitchen. Not your kitchen, of course. Your kitchen is soft and cozy and sacred. THIS kitchen is hard and cold and purely functional. You work tirelessly, sweat pooling on your brow, to make this meal, assisted by a team of chefs. It’s an ambitious feast in the making, and everyone must play their role, without flaw or hesitation. You are set to debut an exclusive menu, never before seen. Its value is in the secrecy as much as it is in the flavors themselves. An oven timer goes off. And another. You turn, drawn by the smell of smoke and a spike of worry. Someone is leaving early, abandoning their station. They stuff a recipe card in their pocket as they go. “Hey!” You shout, but their mind won’t be changed. They are bowing out, leaving you with double the workload, now half burnt and smoking. Their duties weren’t finished, and yet there is nothing you can do to make them stay. Shaken by this loss, chaos descends upon the team. Most roll up their sleeves to work harder. You will love these people eternally, unspeakably grateful for their loyalty. Some strip from their aprons and follow the first traitor out the golden door. But you have never been one to lay your armor down. When you fail, you fail gloriously. When you go, you go kicking and screaming. The cherry red telephone on the wall rings, and it is with intuitive dread that you answer the call. You recognize the voice. Of course you do. “If you still somehow manage to serve that secret menu, it won’t be before the entire world already knows every dish. Every ingredient.” You want to call their bluff. This threat has been made a thousand times, by a thousand others, and yet people line up around the block for your restaurant, never swayed. But this time is different. Because you know this person actually has the means to share the secret menu, and that they have enough proof to make the awaiting guests believe them. Of course they do. You saw them take the recipe card with your own eyes. Another oven timer goes off. 🎃

folklore is the pivot point between Taylor Swift the pop star and Taylor Swift the legend. Before folklore her career had been in an objective "decline", much in line with consumption changes in the industry, with her seeing slowly diminishing success with each successive single and album she'd released after 1989, and that trend halted and reversed with folklore. US pop radio was increasingly reluctant to engage with her singles unless they were perfectly suited to the zeitgeist of the time, like Delicate was in 2018. Her streaming numbers were not terrible, but she was consistently getting out-streamed by the top new names in the industry, much of which was due to her catalogue being absent from platforms which put her on the backfoot. If she had been following a normal pop star path, then that would've been fine and it would've the beginning of her fade from the A-list. Instead, she took a hard left turn and put out folklore. It did unexpectedly massive numbers (including setting the record for the most streamed female album in the first 24 hours, which she broke two more times after that), sure, but what made folklore different was the entire narrative surrounding it. Taylor was no longer just a 'pop star', she was an indie rocker, and for the first time in a very long time, she was at the center of the celebrity discussion because of her music, and not just as a very famous person taking swings at Kanye or jet-setting with Tom. The pitchfork-indie rock dad demographic, who are the ones in the position of deciding which music is legitimate art and not just "pop music" fawned over folklore, and shifted the narrative from 'Taylor makes pop songs' to 'Taylor makes good songs' in communities that would've never seen the light otherwise. Folklore gave Taylor a massive career-jolting shock, and it set her on the path she's currently following.

In the years since, Taylor has clawed her way back to the very very top of the music industry, and with each release she widens the gap between her and everyone below her. Yes, evermore and Fearless TV didn't have the most stellar numbers, they did continue to develop her career arc in an incredibly positive way. Evermore proved to everyone with a toe in the industry that folklore wasn't a fluke, that she was capable of making "artful" music that would satisfy both pretentious indie rockers and her own fans at the same time. Fearless TV proved that Scooter had royally fucked up in his calculus when buying Big Machine, and that Scott Borchetta had royally fucked up when he assumed Taylor's career had peaked and he'd made all the money there was. It proved to executives that the re-recording project could be a success and that she could convince people to seek out the new versions, which is something we take for granted now (just look at the daily streams of each original album versus its re-recording), but was not a guarantee back then. Plus, it was Fearless TV that really lit the match and set the fire under her back catalogue, and got tens of thousands of people who probably had never listened to the original Fearless to go back and listen to her other albums from that era. The numbers weren't huge then, but that was when casual fans and locals started to re-evaluate the depths of her back catalogue. Obviously, Red TV was another step in her career progression, where she proved that a re-recording could be more than just new versions of songs for people to stream in place of the originals. She turned Red TV into a full-fledged era with videos and talk shows, and that a re-recording was able to spawn a ten minute #1 hit that wasn't just driven by fan consumption. Red TV did also act as a catalyst for her massive catalogue growth, but it wasn't the start of it. Finally, Midnights and the Eras Tour have been the true peak of Taylor's career. She's outstreaming the next 4 most popular female acts on Spotify combined. She got an album debut so ludicrously large that it exceeded even the most optimistic of predictions by a significant degree. She was even able to repair her relationship with US radio and turned Anti-Hero into her biggest and most successful song on the Hot 100 since Shake It Off. Taylor can play the pop star game and get the pop star hits and have the pop star tour, but Taylor writes lyrics that appeal to indie rock dads, wields significant power on the indie/alt music charts, and is playing stadiums with crowds so big they're more in line the biggest rocker performances ever than they are with any other pop girl stadium tour. Taylor has moved so far beyond the pop star that she was at the start of the Lover era, thanks to the pivot that happened with folklore. She can be the pop star on the micro-scale, which is seen in how well Midnights is holding up as a current pop album, but she can also be the music legend on the macro-scale, as is seen by the 14 million+ people in line for her concert presale or the immense, immense popularity of her back catalogue that complements the demand for her new music. There's a reason people have started calling this SwiftMania 😉