I imagined myself as Taylor Swift’s boyfriend for a day and it was “weird but it was beautiful”

What would it be like to date the greatest pop star of all time?

The first thing you notice when you enter the bedroom is the sheets. Taylor picked them out. Paisley everywhere. When you lie in it you feel it rustle and crumble beneath you, undulating under the weight of two people very much in a scandal. She would say we are in the “lavender haze”, to be sure. Feels like yesterday when we were watching a Mad Men episode and the term came up. In moments of supreme euphoria, I always look at her eyes. I recommend it in the same way a yoga instructor suggests waking up early in the morning: it enriches your life. The blinding glory of azure flecked with a jet-black immediacy of spirit. It is hard to see when she does that, lighting up the room, every surface ablaze. Your spoon of blueberry cheesecake hangs in awed suspense, unable to find its way to her mouth, her bright pink lip gloss like a drop of strawberry jam in warm milk. But it’s fine. With her, it always is.

I get up and look adoringly at her side of the bed. A shiver runs through me: she’s left already. At the studio, her note on the fridge proclaims, crowned with a penned heart at the bottom. Traces of beige and crimson—war paint from yesterday’s date at Emilio’s Ballato—glisten from her pillow. She doesn’t look it, but if there is one person who loves gossip, some chewing of the proverbial fat, it is Taylor. Look at her. How her hands flit about in animated activity. How her nose flares up just a bit at some infuriating detail. Her eyes widening with amazing grace. How her lips curve with the relish of something exciting. It’s the greatest, sweetest conspiracy. A dance of life.

When we eat out, it’s a slog to get there and hell to get out. Crowds double in a blink, and everybody is shouting, a figment of their late-night musings walking around in person. And I get to lounge around too. Someone once noted that dating her is like hanging out with the sun, gesturing at the amount of attention and heated photography that trails her like the waves crashing off a ship. The sun, eh? Songs by The Beatles (‘Here Comes the Sun’) and The Velvet Underground (‘Who Loves the Sun’), some of our shared favourites, scream around the house. They worship her, the sun. We sometimes discuss what to do if the paparazzi finally catch up with us. Zany today? Bare your teeth tomorrow. Blow a raspberry maybe. Maybe carry something weird in a transparent shopping bag, like Madonna carried a strap-on. We laugh so much at that. We snigger, reduced to red-faced teenagers on the couch, our cheeks warm and fuzzy, our faces radiating the thrum of madness that runs through our hands when we make contact, our fingers tangled like the roots of some grand, fragrant eucalyptus. She phrased it that way, saying she thought that up when writing folklore. I never knew such joy. Except when I watch her sing.

My best days this year have been when she took me along to her studio, where fast friends—luminaries and titans for the rest of us—crack open a Diet Coke and chug it over some of the most pleasing melodies anyone has ever heard. She ties up her hair, maybe for acoustic reasons, when she enters the vocal booth, about to run a victory lap. I once stood near the glass that separates her room from the control room, and my breath fogged it up. In that diffused glow, that wondrous blur, who knows what could happen.

When I hadn’t met her and was content to listen to her on Spotify, I sometimes wondered what expression adorned her face when she said words like the snazzy “beat” (I never miss a beat, ‘Shake It Off’), or when she gasped for breath between “dreaming about the day” and “when you wake up and find” (‘You Belong With Me’). I thought about it when crooning to the tracks during karaoke nights with friends in the city all those years ago. Now I know. It is like being in on some legendary Tibetan secret, awash with some elixir, some forbidden knowledge. I turn around and look at the sound engineers and producers, who have giant headphones glued to their ears, lest they should miss the teeniest inflection of her voice. They nod along, in concert. Then a producer gets up and says something on her device. Taylor nods. Dear Lord, her face is flushed. Sweat drips down her hair. Mist surrounds her head. She nods again and closes her eyes, and lets out a tender vibrato that hangs in the air for a minute. She gets out, gushes to others about something, plans her schedule to produce more versions of a segment of the song. Then she wheels me out into the car. Our palms are clammy with perspiration. When I put mine on the glass window, thick steam rolls off my fingertips, forming a shape like a snow angel. We look at it for a moment and then at each other before we drive off into the evening.

The other day I was having a sandwich at work. Taylor was on a week-long recording marathon and I only saw her once or twice in the house. We FaceTime nearly every day, which is a relief. There’s always activity in her background: some swivelling of the lights, people lugging heavy instruments, snatches of instruction. Someone saw me talking to her, maybe her voice caught their attention, that odd, awesome mix of rasp and heart. I was very conscious of myself for the few seconds of silence that followed her saying, “See ya!” and the screen going black. “What is she working on?” I smiled and said it was none of their business. “Please don’t tweet about this.” I do not want to be the hot topic of the world, and I have been counselled, jokingly, by friends about the consequences of living with and yearning for the greatest, bravest popstar of all time. It never gets easy. I hope it never does.

Sometimes when I get out of my workplace, I find a handful of people with press badges idling by the sidewalk. I pull up my collars and try to sneak my way to the car. They often outpace me and talk to me about this new life of sorts. “It’s great, you know? It’s good.” I say. Where are you holidaying next? “Um, I don’t know, really. We haven’t thought about it. But it’s going to be great.” Do you know what Taylor did on a particular New Year’s vacation some years ago? “Yeah, she made some choices. Great choices. Could I…” I say, running now. “…slip away…”. There is always the risk of that happening. But aren’t all relationships fraught with the concerns of scrutiny, of naysayers wagering against us, willing ill-fortunes into being?

On the way, as passing trees form some sort of amber storm in the setting sun, I turn on the radio. The news. I fiddle the knobs to get to music. Maggie Rogers. Steely Dan. Taylor. It is cheesy, yes, to be so cast under the spell of someone like that, but it’s a magnetic, chemical thing. It’s ‘august’; her airy refrain swims around the warm insides of the car, mixing with the scent from the air freshener in a magnificent alchemy. I have often asked her how she does it. She never elaborates, just the way she never discusses how her hair looks like that, or why she really, “really” insists I don a cravat when I wear a turtleneck. It’s Taylor’s world, and we’re living in it.