Song Meaning
The lyrics immediately plunge into the aftermath of a departure, addressing a former lover who has left. There's a palpable sense of lingering resentment and a struggle to reconcile past intimacy with present distance. The speaker grapples with the other person's transient nature, noting they will "take what you can again."
A core tension emerges from the speaker's reflection on shared history. They question "how can we share out these things / That weren't mine or yours, but ours?" This highlights the difficulty of disentangling a deeply intertwined past. The preceding lines about "every love I've ever had" being marked by "envy and vanity" suggest a pattern of complicated relationships, making the current loss feel particularly poignant.
The most striking detail arrives when the speaker imagines the departed lover, "probably laughing at me." This bitter thought is immediately followed by a powerful image: the person "wearing your clothes and your make up / That you always left off for me." This contrast reveals a performative aspect to the ex-lover's new life, implying they've adopted a public persona they once shed for the speaker, underscoring a sense of betrayal or lost intimacy.
The repeated mantra, "It's alright / Everything will be alright," functions as a desperate attempt at self-soothing, acknowledging the pain while striving for acceptance. The admission that "it might take a long time" for the person to become "a memory" grounds this optimism in a realistic understanding of grief. The final lines, linking the "sunned and it rained" trip to the speaker's fluctuating "moods that I had," beautifully illustrate the personal journey of healing and emotional processing.