It wasn’t just insults, a little dirt on my shoulder to brush the fuck off. It used to be when someone slighted me, it wasn’t our modern take on that word that I filtered through my brain. No, much like the timeframe that the archaic meaning came from: I went medieval on their ass. I used to be silent, without a voice. Before I could speak, the words, whimpering around my vocal cords for the courage to bust a move, would be snatched from my throat. I didn’t know who I was, because I couldn’t look you in the eye, let alone speak words that would define me as some solid mass in shoes outlined by a body my words painted for you. And hell, if I let you see me, that meant you could turn your gaze onto me anytime. Better to be a ghost heart going it alone.

That was terrifying until it wasn’t and until I roared every fucking bit of me any chance I could get. Patience was an STD on this incessant urge of mine to be known in your eyes, his arms, in his embrace, or intertwined between those guys’ legs. I threw myself into a thousand tête-à-têtes and a ménage à trois like every other week, because I wanted to be understood and I was liberated enough to know that I defined all the boundaries of what you knew about me in these temporary trysts. And I’ve never been particularly anything but misunderstood–so those moments, they mattered. And for a fledgling little body defining, filling in his mass so he doesn’t get flung by the wind, a slight was nothing I could ‘shake off’: it was you razing me, destroying all the little factories in my heart producing my personality.

Somewhere along the line last year I began to respect Taylor Swift. By no means is she beleaguered, but either is she well understood. Certainly influenced by the kind of cultural currency I see a Swift song has in SE Asia, I began to understand her as a woman with an astute ear for the beating heart of a pop song. She’s leagues smarter than she ever gets credit for, but lacks the ribald rebelliousness that lacquers her contemporaries in some kind of languid lasciviousness–*cough* Cyrus *cough*. She grew up under the media spotlight, having her world defined for her before her very eyes; but she ‘shakes it off’ and shows us parts of her in a slow, confident leak on her own terms.

FOLLOW DeAf on Soundcloud. Catch a free download at that link.
[Plus, at this point I have a little cottage industry of stellar, indietronica Taylor Swift remixes, check out the Story of The Running Wolf take on ‘We Are Never Getting Back Together’ and APSPDR+ re-imagination of ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’]

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