Streets of Transience

“I’d Never Walk Cornelia Street Again”

I’ve existed in a lot of geographic spaces. From Utah to Washington to New York to Massachusetts to London to Kansas to Texas to Connecticut—I feel like I’ve been around the block, so to speak, when it comes to investing and re-investing myself in a geographic location. Because of these many moves, I’ve never felt a rooted connection to a space. I’ve been asked many times, “Which one is your favorite?”, and I stumble over the answer because I don’t have a favorite. All of them are connected to good and bad memories, great people and worst people, loves and losses.

Lately, I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift’s “Cornelia Street” from her 2019 album Lover on some form of repeat. “Cornelia Street” is a flashpoint into a moment in time—a brief blush in the city—in which the singer reenacts a romance that is tethered to her apartment on Cornelia Street in New York City. The back-and-forth romantic narrative of the song—leaving Cornelia Street, returning, hoping it will work out, wondering if it won’t, leaving, going back—sets in motion a heart on the sea, pushed back and forth, hither and thither, by waves as the struggle for should-we/shouldn’t-we occurs. The refrain—“I’d never walk Cornelia Street again”—sets up this internal battle of yearning and the song leaves, in many ways, the possibility of the love open and closed at the same time. She’ll never walk the street again, but it closes with a repeat of the opening scene: “I rent a place on Cornelia Street, I say casually in the car.” This relationship of existence to streets, romance to road, and time to space is what I’d like to consider in this blog post.  

“This City Screams Your Name”

“Cornelia Street” is attached to location, place, and space. In Greenwich Village, halfway between Bleecker Street and 4th Street, nestled between Jones St. and 6th Avenue, is Taylor Swift’s Cornelia Street Apartment. One can even Google it. (I assume that is the correct apartment; I’m not Swiftie enough to know the exact address.)

Yet this physical location is also transient. Swift doesn’t live or own this space anymore. Instead, it is a space trapped in her memory, connected to what happened—and left with the whisper of a possibility of what could have been. Cornelia Street will always be the street where the memory of this romance happened; it’ll also be the street of possibilities.

Along with the tangibility of the place, Cornelia Street is also a metaphysical street of lyrical existence. It fantastically exists without New York City but always in New York City; it exists in my ears, in your ears, on YouTube, on Spotify. The street moves within eardrums and synapses, being brought to life each time play is hit.

Streets are transience; they’re symbolic of movement, as they take us from one space to another space, always existing in and of themselves but never truly being until one walks on them. This transience is what I connect to in the song. Like Swift, I connect stark memories to each space I have lived.

“Hope It Never Ends”

But it’s not just a transience of space in Swift’s lyrics. Swift weaves chronologically through considering her past in the present, hoping in the past for the future, and establishing a boundary of the future in the present. She walks transient streets of temporality and space, weaving them together in the messed up way that existence is lived.

In other words, her movement through the song is not a progressive narrative. She does not simply meet person, go to her Cornelia Street apartment, develop a romantic relationship with this person, and then end it, never to return to Cornelia Street again. No—like with any romance, she returns to it, relives it, revitalizes it, resurrects it, reengages with it, and then dismisses it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. The romance—the love—is never gone, even if it is trapped in her memory of Cornelia Street. She may never visit the street physically again, but she does visit it cross-temporally, through lyric and memory, each time the song is played and played again.

“Sacred, new beginnings” 

And it is in this existence of transience of space and time that I find hope and love in the song. It isn’t through the relationship between her and her purported Cornelia Street lover; no, the love exists through her ability to transiently pass it from herself to others. The feelings of love do not die with an end; instead, they have many ends, just as they have many beginnings. But they are forever and always trapped in a street—a street of transience.