Like Watching Wild Horses

One of the key tools used in narrative therapy is the use of metaphor to describe and reflect on the challenges of life. An excellent use of metaphor is often used in poetry and song lyrics. The Taylor Swift song “Chloe or Sam or Sophia Or Marcus” has wonderful evocative image that is helpful in exploring the concepts of memory, addiction, love, and the disintegration of a romantic relationship.

From the first line, the lyrics pull us into a fractured emotional landscape:

“Your hologram stumbled into my apartment…”

Metaphor becomes the dominant language of this song. The memories aren’t facts, they are spectral projections. The memories are warped by time, trauma, and longing. The hologram of the former partner evokes a flickering and untouchable copy of a person. The specter intrudes on the speaker uninvited, haunting them even only in memory. The metaphor turns the act of remembering into something ghostly.

As we move through the lyrics, memory behaves like a faulty transmission. The narrative glitches and stutters, not being clear or clean reflection:

“Hands in the hair of somebody in darkness
named Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus…”

The power lies in the vagueness of the names. The interchangeable identity of the other people show the moments that are too painful or confusing to hold clearly. The memory is tied up with intimacy and betrayal, with darkness obscuring the details.

The lyrics described passivity in the pain:

“…And I just watched it happen

..And you just watched it happen.”

This recurring line becomes a refrain, highlighting the passive observation and also the metaphor for emotional abandonment. Standing by and watching becomes a stand-in for inaction. This lack of intervention can wound more deeply than the specific events themselves.

Later the lyrics describe the changes in the relationship:

“I changed into goddesses, villains and fools
Changed plans and lovers and outfits and rules
All to outrun my desertion of you
And you just watched it”

This is not just about evolving or adapting. The speaker cycles through archetypes, costumes, entire lifetimes of identity, trying to escape the pain of being left. These metaphors suggest a loss of self as a coping mechanism.

There is also a metaphor in the contrast between addiction and love:

“You turned me into an idea of sorts
You needed me but you needed drugs more
And I couldn't watch it happen”

The starkness of this line pierces through the metaphorical fog, bringing in realism through the dreamlike reflections. Love is framed as a competing substance, and the relationship is set against a backdrop of unmanageable need. The speaker becomes an idea. No longer a person but a projection of what the other needed them to be. This paralleling the hologram of the opening line, and the phantoms and specters later in the song.

One of the most emotionally rich metaphors describes the wreckage of the relationship:

“Down that passage in time
Back to the moment I crashed into you
Like so many wrecks do
Too impaired by my youth
To know what to do”

The use of the word crashed introduces love as collision. Love isn’t just the act of meeting, it is an accident or wreck. The cause can be linked to the “impaired youth” and uncertainty of how to navigate the violence of themselves and the relationship. There is guilt and a sense that neither party was equipped to survive the impact. Love is framed not as healing, but as damage. The metaphor is effective because it evokes both physical and emotional imagery. A crash implies impact, destruction, but also inevitability. Wrecks don’t plan themselves. They happen when everything converges.

The final verse contains devastating imagery:

“Will that make your memory fade from this scarlet maroon
like it never happened
Could it be enough to just float in your orbit
Can we watch our phantoms like watching wild horses
Cooler in theory but not if you force it
To be, it just didn't happen”

The opening phrase sets the emotional tone, expressing a desperate desire to forget. There is a yearning to cleanse the past and erase the emotional residue. The memory is not just abstract but visual, wanting to fade like a stain, bruise, or photograph. It expresses a desperate desire to forget, to cleanse the past, erase emotional residue, or dull the ache of memory. But "memory" here isn’t just an abstract idea — it’s being framed in visual terms. It has the capacity to “fade,” like a stain, a bruise, or a photograph.

The scarlet maroon juxtaposes the bright intensity of passion with the worn fade of unresolved pain. By putting these two colors together, the speaker is invoking a complex emotional palette. It suggests that the emotional wound isn’t fresh, but it also hasn’t fully healed. It is still raw enough to remember, but too old and layered to scrub away.

This color pairing acts as a symbolic background, like a stained canvas or a bruise. The memory is etched into this emotional surface and the speaker is asking whether any action can actually erase the mark.

There is also a yearning for total erasure. The speaker wants the memory to vanish so completely that the relationship ceases to exist. There is an urge for it to feel unreal, undone, unexperienced. Combined with the color imagery, this is where the emotional devastation lands. The metaphor becomes almost physical: the memory is a stain of scarlet-maroon that the speaker wants to fade, so the wound looks like it was never there at all.

The speaker is no longer trying to reclaim the relationship, but merely to exist within its gravitational field. “Orbit” is a devastating metaphor. It implies closeness without contact, permanent distance held by invisible forces. It's the perfect image for the kind of post-breakup limbo where someone still holds enormous influence over you, even in their absence.

“Phantoms” aren’t just ghosts of people, they can be ghosts of possibilities, of parallel lives that might have been. The wild horses are symbols of freedom, beauty, and untamed energy. They are also inherently dangerous if you try to contain them. The line becomes a meta-metaphor: a comment on the impossibility of truly revisiting or reviving the past. Nostalgia is beautiful, but only from a distance.

The song ends not with closure, but with lingering:

“Will I always wonder?”

Even this question is metaphorical. “Wonder” becomes an emotional placeholder, it stands in for regret, longing, unanswerable questions, the ache of unfinished business. This is not a love song, but a postmortem. The love is gone, but the metaphors it left behind "(crashes, orbits, phantoms, holograms) remain.

The brilliance of these lyrics lies in their refusal to ground themselves. Everything is fluid. The metaphors allow us to feel what the speaker cannot articulate plainly: the mutability of love, the collapse of identity, and the echoing pain of being both remembered and forgotten. In the end, metaphor becomes survival. The only way to make meaning from something that didn’t make any sense.

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