The Black Dog

Taylor Swift

It’s looking in windows

in case you’re looking

back at me. It’s listening to Caruth’s echo[1]

that never ends no matter how long

it reflects off your distant

surface. It’s Johnstone’s black dog,[2]

the proprioceptive[3] exhaustion that follows

me, nipping at my heels—no matter

the treats I toss it or the pets I give

its head, belly, chin. It’s the guilt

at not noticing you stopped

watering the plants. It’s knowing

you had bullies but not knowing

how to defend you. It’s avoiding Marvel, avoiding

the pinball museum, avoiding

the Grandin Theatre, avoiding the food

co-op, avoiding Cookout, avoiding

church, avoiding music. It’s wishing

we had shared locations

and forgotten to turn it off. It’s taking

an alternative route to avoid

an intrusive memory. It’s trying

to remember

you liked my legs. It’s

the new towels, still in the bag, I bought

the day you left. It’s

seeing the back of your

head downtown but knowing it’s

not the back of your head

because you had cystic acne

scars from high school. It’s

the vestibular[4] ritual

of emptying the litter boxes

on Sunday nights and the trash bag

bursting open and saying

damn, shit, mother fucker, why?

It’s the interoceptive[5] wondering:

What did you say to the cats?

How were you a functioning alcoholic?

Why did you sleep in your office the two

weeks before you left?

Where did you go those two

days? Why didn’t I notice

your new aesthetic? How much

sad did you think I

had in me? It’s all Mondays

in an endless February.

[1] Trauma theorist Cathy Caruth describes how trauma “echoes” through the psyche, a sound from the past that insists on being heard in the present and resists the possibility of final mourning.

[2] In I Had a Black Dog (2005), Matthew Johnstone visualizes depression as a looming, ever-present black dog, an image borrowed from Winston Churchill.

[3] Proprioception refers to the awareness of where one’s body is in space—an embodied orientation that links motion, memory, and presence. It describes how the self feels itself existing. In the context of grief and trauma, proprioception falters. The body forgets its boundaries and misplaces its coordinates.

[4] Relating to the body’s sense of balance and spatial orientation, governed by the inner ear. In the context of grief, the vestibular describes the feeling that the world’s axis has shifted and equilibrium must be relearned.

[5] Interoception refers to the body’s ability to perceive and interpret internal physiological signals, sensations like heartbeat, hunger, thirst, and breath. Trauma can disrupt this sense, leading to dissociation or difficulty distinguishing between emotional and physical sensations.