ivy

How's one to know? I'd meet you where the spirit meets the bones, in a faith forgotten land
In from the snow, your touch brought forth an incandescent glow
Tarnished but so grand
And the old widow goes to the stone every day, but I don't, I just sit here and wait
Grieving for the living

Her gloved hand met mine above the frosty grave at exactly 11:38 in the morning. She

had walked over from the stone next to me, having left a bouquet of fresh flowers that would

surely freeze and die by the time she was gone. She left them anyway. She had come to

remember someone she loved. I, no one in particular. At least no one dead, anyway. The initial

instinct to jerk my hand from a stranger’s grip was quickly defeated by today’s desperate urge to

be acknowledged. Crisp November air pinched my throat with my puzzled inhale. Maybe today

I’d humour this woman and my own escapist fantasies.

“Who are you here for?” she asked, kind eyes flickering up to mine.

“Oh, um, no one really.”

A clear lie. There was heaviness in my chest that threatened to pull the grief from my

throat. I yearned to pull someone, anyone, into my lonely orbit. My fingers tingled with an

electric longing to squeeze the frustration I had come here to alleviate into her. My thumb

strayed to rub the bare skin I had twisted my wedding ring from that morning. I stayed silent.

“Well, I’m here for my grandma. As of today, it’s been a whole five years.” she paused,

turning her gaze back to her grandmother’s grave for a moment and pulling up her knitted scarf

to wipe her nose, “Cancer’s a bitch.”

“Shit,” I mumbled.
 She inched closer to me, “Yeah, not the most glamourous of deaths. I think she wanted to

get into a bomb defusing accident, you know,” her eyes softened, and she gave a sharp, amused

exhale from her nose, “Go out with a bang.”

Clipped laughter escaped me in surprise. “That’s good. Was she funny?”

She shined a triumphant smile at me. “Clever as a fox, that woman. I miss that the most.”

My god. There was sudden brightness under her skin that I hadn’t seen before. Suddenly,

I thought that this woman before me could part skies with her contrarian wit. I turned to her,

hand still in her woolen grasp, and gently said, “I’m Este.”

“Taylor,” she replied.

Oh, goddamn, my pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand

Taking mine, but it's been promised to another
Oh, I can't stop you putting roots in my dreamland
My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you

Three weeks of meeting behind the willow at the graveyard passed before she kissed me

for the first time, and it was another two months before I told her I was married. I took her up to

the cottage by the lakes, and hands trembling, confessed in the kitchen light on the very last

night. We had just come in from a walk by the frozen water. The cold followed us across the

threshold and settled into our bones. The fire in the hearth still danced, though it looked like it

would turn to embers soon. She made a beeline to toss on a new log, then bounced to the kitchen

as though the fire she tended lent her its newfound energy. No, she was the fire. Warm, lively, I

needed her to survive. Shit. I wanted to preserve this moment, preserve her, in a still image so I

could never leave it. But I couldn’t keep lying to her; she deserved honesty from me.
 She was stirring cocoa powder into a pot of milk when I pulled her from the stove, turned

her wrist upward, and placed my wedding ring in the centre of her hand.

She looked at her palm in shock, then back up into my eyes, “Este,” she smiled in

disbelief, “what the fuck is this?”

Her whispered words fell through clenched teeth like sand through fingers. I thought I

was going to throw up. The back of my throat tensed in a desperate attempt to hold back a sob.

“God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She blinked in confusion, then in steely understanding. Wiping the anger that welled in

her eyes, she left with my ring clenched in her fist. Twenty minutes felt like twenty years as I sat

on the tiled floor waiting for her to come back to me. I smelled the milk burning, and just as I got

up to scrape the pot, she walked back in. After the initial shock had worn off, she seemed to have

good sense to ask, “Fuck, Este. Tell me one thing first. Whose fucking house is this?”

I rushed to answer, “Ours. Well. His grandma left it to him in the will, but really I’m the

only one who comes up anymore.” I admitted. I felt my stomach heave and beg for her

forgiveness. Then, in a selfish plea to win back some favour, I spat out, “But he won’t find us

here.”

She breathed out a soft “oh”. Then, drawing back her shoulders and straightening her

neck, she quietly asked, “Who else have you brought here with you?”

I was struck by her resigned tone. I had expected her to scream at me, throw the nearest

ceramic at me. It’s strange, but when I realized that her reaction was not going to be violent,

relief folded itself into gratitude, and gratitude into love. She wasn’t going to hurt me. I still

sensed her trademark tension, but I felt that she was preparing for disappointment, not anger. I

scrambled to reassure her, “No one else. I swear. It’s only ever been you.”
 A shaky exhale. A drop of the battle stance. She believed me. She then placed the ring

back in my hand and closed my fingers around it, as if signaling to me that my past was mine.

Good. She didn’t belong there with all the mess.

“This,” she squeezed my closed fist, “is none of my goddamned business. Understood?”

I nodded, “I just thought you should know.”

“I know, I know.”

She held me with such soft tenderness that I thought I might shatter. Our love affair may

have been nascent, but it’s been the only thing that’s made me feel alive in seven fucking years.

She willed joy into existence; creation was hers to command. I would swear to anybody's god

that there was magic in her soul.

Her hair glowed in the dim kitchen light. She looked like a nymph in the incandescence,

and I felt my every nerve singe with life. Every passing moment in her arms felt like a year’s

worth of new growth broke through my arteries, entwining me inside her embrace where it was

warm.

She would ruin me, and I would let her.

I wish to know the fatal flaw that makes you long to be magnificently cursed
He's in the room, your opal eyes are all I wish to see
He wants what's only yours

He had one elbow against the doorframe while the other gestured erratically around his

head. I kept my eyes trained on the crystal rocks glass in his hand. Pungent whiskey sloshed up

the sides as he detailed his firm’s newest acquisition with fiery passion. Taylor sat atop the dark

wooden stool at the kitchen island, perched like an eagle watching for field mice. She looked like

she was waiting for a reason to dive into the tall grass.
 As we smiled and nodded the evening away, liquor permeated our breaths and our

thoughts. His glass, now empty, sat lonely back at the oak table, replaced by a lit cigar. He

seemed calmer. I felt walls melt with each sip, and some magnetic force pulled me closer to

Taylor through the evening’s hours until I hopped up to sit on the cold white marble of the

kitchen island. I turned to look at her, and the edges of her eyes creased with her soft smile. I

smiled back, feeling her arm draped on my thigh like a woolen blanket, then turned back to my

husband.

He had stiffened. Despite his slightly slurred speech, his senses had stayed sharp enough

to notice for the first time in the entire night how close to Taylor I had stayed. His gaze seared

into the touch of her elbow resting on the hem of my dress, then up to meet my gaze. My hand

crept down to push her off of me, but the fire did not leave his eyes.

When Taylor left for the night, the house fell into tense silence. The only sound that

echoed through our halls was the clicking of his lighter. His thumb played with the flame, on,

off, on, off, until we went to bed without a word.

Lying at opposite edges of our king-sized bed (he insisted on the luxury, and I reveled in

the widened distance between us) and facing opposite walls, I wondered what could possibly

have tempted Taylor into dinner and drinks under the roof that housed the man she took the place

of. And more than that, I wondered what lust for danger tempted her into the arms of a woman.

A married one, no less. I had pulled hair out of my scalp trying to scrape my mother’s doctrine

from my mind, but Taylor never budged in her belief that she did not make a choice or a mistake

in loving women. There was a brilliant kind of courage to her, one that she wielded like a sword,

and I dreamed of wearing like armour someday. Loving her felt like freefalling over a cliff; the

wind muffles everything but the adrenaline. I knew I was probably rushing toward disaster, but
until then I would bask in electric passion. We both risked much more than being accused of

adultery in being with each other, because cheating they could forgive. What we had would have

us smeared with the red paint of shame and sin, but the bottom of the canyon hadn’t crushed our

bones yet.

Clover blooms in the fields, spring breaks loose, the time is near
What would he do if he found us out?
Crescent moon, coast is clear, spring breaks loose, but so does fear
He's gonna burn this house to the ground

It had been four months since a stranger took my hand in the middle of a frosted

graveyard, but the cover of winter was fading fast. The darkness that held the moments we stole

would give way to blinding daylight soon enough. Our sacred hidden corners would be

illuminated. Each warmer day felt like one closer to being caught. An invisible hand had closed

around my ribs, threatening to squeeze the air from my lungs with every passing moment we

were together. Time felt like an enemy we tiptoed around, and we knew the eggshells we walked

on couldn’t hold our weight for much longer.

Joy faded with routine, giving way to a new clawing at the bottom of my stomach

whenever we touched. Does hedonistic exhilaration justify my love for another woman? Does

temptation seduce me from my vows? But these questions faded to the background when I

imagined an April sun casting accusatory light upon the alleyways and beds we loved in. I felt

the tension seep into her bones as well. She knew the hourglass would soon run out of precious

sand, but we kept seeing each other behind and in between our lives. Her fingertips scorched

with urgency. I felt the burn of our worry set alight every time we touched. If we were ever found

out, I think I just might burst into flames as the object of an arsonist's affection.
 How's one to know? I'd live and die for moments that we stole
On begged and borrowed time
So tell me to run, or dare to sit and watch what we'll become
And drink my husband's wine

This was the first weekend we had to ourselves in a long time. A business trip had

whisked my husband away to whatever new city he felt destined to conquer. He didn’t say which

one, but I assumed he didn’t think it was important for me to know. Taylor and I sat on the deck

of the cottage, cross legged on a picnic blanket with the cellar’s finest in our glasses. She had

insisted on lighting a candlestick despite the wind. It was the middle of the night, but warm

enough to sit and look for constellations. We smelled like bug spray. The waves crashed in

melancholy harmony against the shore.

“Do you think we’re doing the wrong thing?” I asked, suddenly prompted by the water’s

ballad.

Taylor looked at me with a puzzled smile, “What? What do you mean?”

“I just... I feel like sometimes I’m going insane. I’m so infatuated with you, but I can’t

help but wonder sometimes if it’s not what I'm supposed to do. I’m supposed to be somebody’s

wife. I just feel like this might be wrong.”

She stiffened at the word wrong. I rushed to clarify, “No! No no no. I didn’t mean wrong

like that. God, I don’t regret a second of the hours we’ve spent together. I just meant, well, I’m

not actually sure,” I admitted, “but there’s something that itches in the back of my mind when

I’m with you, and I think it’s guilt.”

 Her posture softened. She took my glass and replaced it with her hand, “Este, I’m going

to try to not take that personally,” she joked, “but if you don’t want to do this anymore, then we

can stop, and you can leave. But I’m still here. It’s still fun to be with you.”

“I don’t know. I just feel like someone’s going to find out about us and tell everyone. And

I don’t know what I’d do if that happened. I think my mother might never speak to me again.”

“Maybe she wouldn’t. But you’d still have me. I’d stay with you through hell or high

water, you know that right?”

I squeezed her hand in mine tighter, trying to will time to stop when I’m with her for the

hundredth time. I leaned in close, touching my forehead to hers. “You know, you look very

beautiful right now.”

She brought her hand up to cradle my face, “I could drink you in all day.”

Then we heard a car pull up.

So yeah, it's a fire, it's a goddamn blaze in the dark

And you started it, you started it
So yeah, it's a war, it's the goddamn fight of my life
And you started it
You started it

We pulled away like someone had thrown a bucket of ice water at us. I felt my blood run

cold. I scrambled to get up and turned to Taylor, whispering, “Hide.”

She shot up and looked at me like I had asked her to jump on a live grenade. “What did I

just say? Hell or high water, Este. Hell or high fucking water.”

“Taylor, please. I’ve told you how he gets. Let me deal with this. You go wait this out.” I

knew she could hear the rising panic in my voice, but she held firm.
 “No. Enough of this dancing around the truth. I hate it. I hate it so much. Come on. We’re

dealing with this together.” She held out a determined hand.

I drew a deep breath and took it. If I couldn’t convince her to leave, then I might as well

find strength in her staying. She grabbed the candle to light the way as she pulled us through the

living room to the front door. My hand never left her defiant grasp. Throwing the door open, we

were met with my husband shaking an upside-down can of gasoline halfway down the dirt

driveway.

“Harvey! What the fuck are you doing!” I screamed, smelling the contents of his empty

container. The implications of his actions shocked me too much to offer him an excuse or

explanation for why we were here together, much less ask what he was doing here.

He looked up from his trail of fuel. If looks could kill, I would’ve been dead before I hit

the ground. He gave no preamble before screaming, “Listen, you vicious little bitch. You think

you can get away with this shit,” he waved his arms back and forth wildly at us, “behind my

back?” he sneered, tone changing from volcanic eruption to a shifting of tectonic plates under the

sea. His anger, now relatively constrained, bubbled beneath the surface, “I know you’ve been

coming here and defiling my grandmother’s cottage with whatever it is you whores do here when

you run from me.” He pointed an accusatory finger at Taylor without even looking at her. “You

think she can give you what I’ve given you? See how well you fare without my family’s fucking

house!”

He reached into his pocket, but before he could pull anything out, Taylor dropped the

candle directly into the nearest puddle of gasoline. Flames burst upward, almost catching her

hand, but she pulled back just in time. Harvey stood in shock. We both leapt back instinctually

from the fire. I grabbed her wrist and back through the cottage and down the hill to the lake.
 When we got to the water, I yelled, “Taylor? What the fuck? What the actual fuck are you

doing?”

Her face betrayed no signs of regret, or even worry. She looked like a mad scientist,

frazzled but triumphant. “If that motherfucker thinks he can get the upper hand on us, he is

sorely mistaken. I don’t let other people win.”

“Winning is not burning down a fucking building! We need to get to the fire extinguisher!

You made your fucking point! I’m sure Harvey’s already halfway down the road by now, seeing

as you beat him to the arsonist’s chase!”

Taylor’s eyes forged steel in their hardening. “No. We stay, and we watch it burn.”

“What?”

“I said, we fucking watch. It. Burn.”

I didn’t know what to say. Disbelief scratched into my face with the growing plumes of

smoke.

“This house! That man! That’s all in your past if you let it burn the fuck down! He knows

about us, and it seems like he’s known for a while now. I really don’t expect someone like him to

respect your privacy, so there’s no use in hiding it anymore.” The fire was growing, and it cast a

maniacal orange upon her face. “Harvey was prepared to burn this cottage down anyway. I just

wanted him to know he can’t burn us down with it.”

I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. “I guess it was hell, then.”

“What?”

“You said hell or high water. I’m pretty fucking sure this isn’t high water. So, hell it is.”

Taylor gripped both my hands in hers, turned us so we were facing away from the fire,

and kindly said, “Look. We can call the fire department if you want, but it’s going to take them
ages to get here. Or, and please, try to hear me out. You let that bastard’s upper class summer

home burn to the ground.” Her eyes searched mine for any sign of a runaway’s resolve.

“What then?” I asked, matching her gaze with an intensity of my own.

“What not then!” she laughed in the firelight, “God, the shit we could do without

tiptoeing around that stupid man in that stupid house with your picket fence and your

million-dollar couch!”

I craned my neck to look up at the cottage, which had grown into a full-fledged

emergency. Even at the edge of the lake, I was beginning to feel the soft heat of the fire. The roof

would collapse soon. There was no saving it now.

Turning back to the woman who had set it all ablaze, I gingerly asked, “Where are we

going to go?”

Her eyes lit up at my open-ended question. “I don’t know. I don’t know! But don’t you

think freedom is better than sneaking around, waiting to be found out? After all this time -” her

voice broke, and for the first time in half a year, I saw her cry. She didn’t wipe her nose with her

sleeve and laugh to herself, or blink quickly looking up at the sky. She cried. “After all this time,

don’t you think we deserve to give ourselves a chance, Este?”

She stepped close and pulled me into her by the waist, begging me with her hands as

much as her words. I could only look at her for so long without feeling her palpable pleading.

God, she wanted us to work – really work – so badly. Maybe we could be oak trees, surviving

and growing through a forest fire. Maybe I could let my fear, my paranoia, my grief burn with

the wood panel walls. But there was more than just my own baggage to contend with.
 “And what about the world?” I asked quietly, almost losing my words to the crackling of

the flames. “Harvey found out and tried to burn us like witches. How are we supposed to face the

rest of the world?”

“We’ll fight. And if you get tired, I’ll fight enough for the both of us.”

The first rafter fell, shooting a flurry of sparks into the black sky. I almost felt relief

watching it go down. Room for new growth. I turned back to Taylor, and felt my resolve solidify.

“You’d kill yourself fighting alone. This war is ours.”

We ended up sitting down in the grass, my head on her shoulder as the fire traded light

with the sky, orange melting to pink on the horizon. Fire services stayed sound in their beds in

those wee hours of the morning; the fire died naturally when the last of the cedar porch finally

sated its appetite.

Maybe we’d die out there too, after all, the world never stopped its rotation to mourn two

lovers who met in tragedy. But maybe two women on their own could make it, and in the ashes

of a self-made fire, build a new house that stands long enough for ivy to grow over the windows.
 My House of Stone, Your Ivy Grows, And Now I’m Covered in Heteronormativity

Taylor Swift’s “Ivy” (stylized as ivy) is a song that details the intimacy and fear of an

extramarital affair. She writes from the perspective of someone who has fallen out of love with

their husband and finds themselves in a deep and intricate romantic entanglement with somebody

else. This song underscores fear in two ways. The first is the traditional fear of being caught. The

second, however, finds the protagonist fearing the very act of falling in love. This suggests a

forbidden nature beyond marital infidelity, adding what I believe is a further infidelity to

heteronormativity. This fanfiction queers the narrative by reimagining the affair as between two

women and transforms the context of the intimacy and the fear. Within this new dynamic, these

feelings now call upon a history of marginalization, and interact both with characters directly

involved, and the larger social landscape. In this paper I will show how the transformation of this

story into one that centres two sapphic women challenges the single story of heteronormative

hegemony.

In her TEDTalk titled “The danger of a single story”, Chimamanda Adichie cautions

against all hegemonic forms of storytelling, claiming that, “the consequence of the single story is

this: it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition for equal humanity difficult.” (2009).

Swift’s discography is often portrayed as one such single story: that of heterosexual

relationships. Though much of her music contends with other subject matter, it is widely

recognized that she is most renowned for her ability to write about romantic love. These songs

are most often perceived as written about men. The mass interpretation of Swift’s work as

heterosexual points to a greater social force that compels listeners to view a straight relationship

as the default. This force is heteronormativity. One must specify queerness in order to be viewed
as such. Though there is an autobiographical nature in her past music, evermore (the album that

“ivy” is on) is a work that Swift takes care to mention is based in fictional “dreamscapes” (2020).

My reimagination of Swift’s trademark feminine romantic yearning as applying to a woman

intercepts this heteronormative expectation, creating an oppositional reading of the story. In this

song, Swift encodes – though perhaps unconsciously – emotions easily applicable to a queer

reading of the relationship between these two characters, and thus lent itself to a queer diversion

from the canon of the heterosexual single story of romance. To tell this alternative narrative

creates a site of humanization for queer lives, allowing for the “recognition of equal humanity”

that Adichie so values.

The themes I aimed to decode in this work as queer centres around the hidden nature of

the affair. The immense pressure to keep their relationship hidden takes on a second, more

pressing necessity when it becomes a queer narrative. It creates an asymmetric relationship of

oppressor versus oppressed, and thus the secrecy in which the affair takes place comes to

conflate with the margins into which queer communities have historically been pushed. This not

only raises the stakes of the story, but creates a unique source of queer empathy for the

protagonist. Her grief for her own life becomes an indictment of social ill (misogyny,

homophobia, etc.) rather than a reason to reinforce heteronormativity in media through an affair

with a man.

Fan works that transform the original narrative in this way are vital to marginalized

communities’, especially young people’s, participation in pop culture and media. Much of the

media in pop culture remains exclusively representative of the hegemonic identity, alienating a

large percentage of their consumers. Through the transformed retellings of popular and beloved

stories, those that are dispossessed of representation in media can reclaim these narratives and
create new readings of them that centre their own experience. In addition to this form of

empowerment, fan interventions of the canon allow for necessary critique of the source material

and the sociohistorical forces that both influence and are influenced by it. By offering an

alternative, fans state that they are fundamentally unhappy with the source material in some way.

This creates space for dialectic that can then widen public perceptions of whose stories should be

told. Returning to Adichie’s critique of the single story, transformative interpretations interrupt

the incumbent notions of “normalcy” to introduce and tell hidden stories that have not had the

chance to be told.

Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda. “Chimamanda Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story - Youtube.”

YouTube, 2013. Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story.

Swift, Taylor. “evermore album cover.” Instagram, December 10, 2020. Accessed

November 24, 2021. https://www.instagram.com/p/CInkR4Ajyi1/