trying to remember how it feels to have a heartbeat
I’ve written about songs Harry Styles wrote that seem to be about Taylor Swift before, last time I did this. You can believe whatever you want about exactly who the “eyes blue” in Two Ghosts belong to, but as with Perfect, it’s hard not to see Taylor being called out specifically in the imagery: her red lipped classic thing that you like, his long hair, slicked back, white tee shirt.
Those three images– blue eyes, red lips, white shirt– are the meme of their relationship, the easiest and most public shorthand for it; they don’t point us inward, towards the intimate experience of it, but rather toward the surface, the way we’ve consumed it from the outside: as a series of paparazzi photos, fan rumors, and then, ultimately, recorded song lyrics. Style and Perfect (and the rest of 1989) codified the vocabulary we’d use to discuss the relationship, the images of it we’d most remember, and associate with it.
Two Ghosts marks the moment at which you look at an old flame and realize you can bring up the memories you’ve made for yourself of them– this moment, that outfit, the fucking feeling– but beyond that there’s not much anymore. Your memory is more constructed than recalled.
They’re lost to you, and in losing them, you’ve lost some small, vital piece of your own self.
(Losing this piece of self is the only way to keep on growing up.)
With Perfect, I wrote about the idea that Taylor had trapped the ghost of their relationship in the structure of her song, so that in writing Perfect Harry was perhaps, at least in part, writing about what it felt like to be used that way, and to be complicit in using your self in writing your own work: turning your private emotional life into very public art.
Perfect is ironic, but Two Ghosts is not at all arch; it’s sweetly mournful, an empty-handed pean to something so long lost that there’s nothing to hold into anymore, nothing left but memory, or spirit— or maybe just illusion.
How do you prove you existed? How do you prove that what you felt, especially when the feeling existed between two people who aren’t on the same page anymore, was ever real? Taylor’s answer is defiant: she sings, over and over again, oh I remember. She records her personal history in order to give weight to her version of events.
But Two Ghosts knows that being able to remember something doesn’t mean you can make it live again; having control over the past doesn’t give you any way to steady yourself against the heartbreak of the present.
Every time Harry sings we’re just two ghosts swimming in a glass half-empty I hear echoes of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, which goes we’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl / year after year. Wish You Were Here is also about the distance that time creates, about the tricks that the mind plays on us: oh / so you think you can tell / heaven from hell? Blue skies from grey? The song is a series of questions about what its subject has been up to— did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze? But nothing changes its inevitable conclusion: oh I wish, how I wish you were here.
Romantic nostalgia longs for a lost self as much as the lost love. Whoever the song is about, their presence makes Harry feel like a ghost of himself, like since he felt that he hasn’t felt anything at all. Trying to remember how it feels to have a heart / beat. Memories seem like good company but in fact they all too often just make you lonely, reminding you of how many past selves there are to mourn.