Cleopatra

I have spent close to a decade getting this song wrong, and I like my version better.

I finally heard a cover of it last week, instead of the Lumineers’ version I’ve been playing since 2016. Hearing it in someone else’s voice, I couldn’t tighten the drawstrings of nostalgia. I was paying fresh attention.

This whole time the ending was not “a bed and a bathroom/ and a place with you,” but rather “a bed and a bathroom/ and a place for the end.”

The speaker of the poem is led by their nurse to their own guest room to die alone.

There was never a reconciliation. No Notebook-like final scene together in a hospital bed.

Just a nurse in white shoes and a place to die.

Now that I know how it really goes, I’m partial to the lie I’ve told myself.

I’m not new to bungling lyrics. There’s at least one word per Taylor Swift song that I get wrong. I find something that makes enough sense and I make it fit the story I want to hear.

I wanted the speaker’s lover to barrel into the backseat of their cab, realize who the driver is, and for them to reconnect.

I was never preoccupied with how long it took for the past lovers to rekindle in a cab. I got the rest of the song right. I understood that decades passed, both of them married other people. I knew they didn’t find their way back expediently, but it was enough to me that it happened at all.

Now I know that it didn’t happen ever. Not for anyone but me.

That song is forever changed for me now. I can be a little sad about that, but I can also acknowledge that I was the one place, the one branch in the timeline, where that story had a happy ending.

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Based on a True story