We’re All Mad Here: Denial, Distress, and Desire in “Fortnight”

If loving someone is already ruining your life, maybe you’ve got nothing left to lose?

Wise men once said you’ll never get over a heartbreak if you’re still holding on to hope that you might get a second chance at love—or vengeance. The opening track of Taylor Swift’s eleventh studio album defines a period of time characterized by inner turmoil and distress, solidifying her Tortured Poet status and reckless yearning in the first four minutes of the album.

New Era New Me?

Given Swift’s extraordinarily extensive discography, some of her lyrics are best understood in relation to other songs. The first few lines of “Fortnight” bring us right back to the end of “Hits Different,” where the disoriented speaker asks: “Is it you? / Or have they come to take me away?” Now, she reveals that she “was supposed to be sent away / but they forgot to come and get” her. “Fortnight” inadvertently answers the previous questions by repeating these keywords: the ominous, abstract third-person “they” had indeed planned to send her “away”. Like in the music video, the literal interpretation is that she was bound for a psychiatric hospital, but perhaps Swift is extrapolating this symbol to the context of leaving her public life.

The speaker then confesses: “I was a functioning alcoholic / Til nobody noticed my new aesthetic.” Swift has increasingly made offhand references to excessive drinking over the last few years, both in her songs and at the Eras Tour, especially as a consequence of pandemic isolation. This is the most direct remark of the sort, whether or not it is meant autobiographically. The term “functioning alcoholic” highlights the speaker’s ability to mask her feelings (like her face tattoos) and keep up a charade of health and stability. Alcohol, like the relationship Swift describes in this song, is toxic, and the speaker has reached a breaking point as she descends into heartbreak, jealousy, and anger. Notably, the word “aesthetic” disrupts the rhyme that might be expected with “me” from the second line, sonically reinforcing this previously overlooked visual change. Swift concludes the first verse with the contradictory statements that the muse is “the reason” for the speaker’s pain but “no one here’s to blame.” She refuses to admit the degree to which the muse is at fault, instead separating them from their actions and asking, “what about your quiet treason?” Whatever they did to hurt her went largely unnoticed but was an immense betrayal; regardless, she can’t get over this lost love.

The Addiction Cycle

Jumping ahead, the second verse reveals more about the severity of the speaker’s mental state. Like the monotonous beat and dark-toned bass line of the song, the speaker is trapped in a cycle of negative emotions compared through metaphor to “Mondays stuck in an endless February”—ironic for the shortest month of the year. Then, despite taking “the miracle move-on-drug,” she finds that “the effects were temporary” (this fleetingness can contribute to addictive behaviors). She tries in vain to move on, and in the music video is even given a pill from a bottle labeled “FORGET HIM” in the psych ward, but the miracle doesn’t work. This is also the first part of the song showcasing Post Malone’s featured vocals: he sings with Swift on the second halves of these lines to suggest that the speaker is haunted by this other voice, whether that represents the person she’s addressing or another version of herself (more on this later).

We then arrive at the thesis of the song and the lyrics that Swift teased on one of her vinyl variants before the release of The Tortured Poets Department: “I love you, it’s ruining my life.” Put simply, the speaker blames herself and her feelings toward the muse for the descent of her life into chaos. She makes sure everyone knows that their connection was significant, albeit shortlived: “I touched you for only a fortnight / I touched you, but I touched you.” Swift’s repetition of this phrase suggests that she might mean “touch” in both the physical and emotional sense—to have an effect on someone, for better or for worse.

A Healthy Dose of Murder

In the chorus, the juxtaposition of “for a fortnight there, we were forever” restates the crux of the song, as the speaker believed this connection would last a lifetime and, instead, it lasted just fourteen days. There’s a unique frustration that comes with being trapped in the same social circle as an ex-lover: “Now you’re in my backyard, turned into good neighbors / Your wife waters flowers, I want to kill her.” The relationship has been reduced to polite surface-level interactions because the speaker sees the muse and their wife everywhere and is forced to bottle up her evident rage. Swift paints a picture of seeing the wife minding her own business across the backyard, and her mere existence is enough to incite murderous intent.

The second time around, the add-on chorus brings in new examples of these neighborly pleasantries, with a notable change: “My husband is cheating, I want to kill him.”¹ This is the first and only reference to the speaker having a husband at all, perhaps because she is so preoccupied with thoughts of the muse; she’s cheating as well, at least emotionally. While Swift’s syntactic alignment of the two statements in this line implies that the speaker might want to kill her husband due to his infidelity (red herring alert!), their place in the narrative suggests that she sees this as a way out of her marriage to be with her muse. Killing the wife would certainly also help with the availability issue. In the song “ivy” from evermore, the speaker laments the fact that “the old widow goes to the stone every day / But I don’t, I just sit here and wait / Grieving for the living.” “Fortnight” and “ivy” express the same dissatisfaction where the speaker feels trapped in a marriage (“cage” references all over TTPD, anyone?). Whereas the “ivy” girl takes the passive route of “grieving” a man who’s not dead yet, waiting for the day that she becomes a widow, the “Fortnight” speaker expresses a clear desire to take matters into her own hands and change her fate.

Bitter til the End

In the final section of the song, Post Malone sings four lines and Swift repeats them. Rather than this being a dialogue between the two voices, they seem to represent the same character expressing the same feelings (they also mirror each other throughout the music video). The speaker’s insecurity resurfaces in thinking that calling the muse is pointless and they “won’t pick up”—is it genuine futility or self-sabotage? Either way, she’s “lost” time to this relationship. The speaker paints Florida as an escape, taunting and urging the muse to run away: “buy the car you want / But it won’t start up til you touch, touch, touch me.” The speaker is convinced that even if the muse leaves and superficially has everything they want, it will only be for show; the “car” won’t actually function and life won’t be worth living unless they reconnect.

Despite being hurt, the speaker insists through to the end of the song that they might be better off together, or at least relishes in the fact that the muse is doomed to be unhappy if they remain apart. She wants them both to abandon their picture-perfect lives and spouses in favor of a reckless, destructive reunion because she would rather have the potential instability and anxiety of their trust-deprived relationship than her current all-consuming numbness. The end of the song where she toys with the idea of reconciliation introduces slightly more musical variety in terms of the production and Swift’s vocal range, leaving the listener with a glimmer of perhaps delusional hope amidst the chaos. After all, Swift’s songs have prioritized volatile, passionate relationships over mundanity since 2008’s “The Way I Loved You.” There’s just something about that “roller coaster kind of rush!”

1. This lyric has a direct link to “Florida!!!”, where the story picks back up, but let’s save that for another time.