The first bonus track of Taylor Swift’s 2022 album Midnights - featuring on the ‘3am edition’ - is titled ‘The Great War’. I remember listening to it in my kitchen as I stacked the dishwasher, an act of quotidian mundanity incongruously soundtracked by Swift’s passionate hymning of a relationship that, against the odds, survives a ‘great war’ of miscommunication, paranoia, distrust and past trauma only to come out stronger: ‘I vowed I would always be yours/’Cause we survived the Great War’. It features a veritable litany of figurative language in which love becomes a battle, heartbreak becomes death, emotional wounds literal bruises. So far, so Swift. But when the song reached the bridge, where Swift sings the lines, ‘We could plant a memory garden/Say a solemn prayer, place a poppy in my hair’, I felt an uneasiness kicking in. What was strange is that I recognised it as a very specific kind of uneasiness, because I had felt it precisely once before.