There are certain songs you can listen to on repeat and never get tired of. Songs whose message never loses meaning, no matter how much time passes.
While I could sit here and list more than a few that fall into this category, I want to spotlight one of the most beautifully tragic tracks I’ve ever heard: “Cellophane” by FKA Twigs.
“Didn’t I do it for you… why don’t I do it for you?”
The song begins with this raw desperation that never fails to make me sick to my stomach. Like many others, I am instantly taken back to a time where my brain felt like it was eating itself alive trying to wrap around the truth: there are people who can come into your life, see every part of you, and still choose to look away. People who would rather remain blind than continue truly seeing you.
“They want to see us, want to see us alone… they want to see us, want to see us apart.”
As the song continues, you’ll hear this phrase repeated. As clear as the meaning may be to some, I never fully understood the weight behind it. The gravity of trying to justify someone’s lack of love and regard for you by blaming it on the world instead. As if someone who ever truly wanted you would let anyone get in the way of having you.
“I just want to feel you’re there, and I don’t want to have to share our love.”
This line alone led to countless theories online regarding who Twigs could have been speaking about, and what she truly meant by it. And yes, being someone influential and constantly watched plays a role in that speculation. But to the rest of us (the “normal,” the unnoticed, the non-famous), this line hits somewhere much more personal.
The way I connected to this line was very teenage-girl coded. It instantly brought me back to being in high school, where love didn’t even have to be real for it to consume you. Where you could fall for someone off a glance, or even just off the idea of what they could eventually be to you.
Yet, somehow, it felt just as devastating as heartbreak in adulthood. It’s about wanting someone to choose you without hesitation, wanting to be the only one they saw, wanting to believe that you were enough to be kept around.
Because before you even learn what love truly is, you learn what longing is.
You learn what craving presence feels like. You learn what begging in silence feels like. You learn what it feels like to want to be wanted more than you want to be understood.
And that is the ache Twigs captures in this entire song: the ache of wanting someone so completely that you would rather have them halfway than not at all.
“They’re waiting, they’re watching … they’re hoping I’m not enough.”
The perfect ending to such a painfully relatable song. The idea that someone could see all of you. This is every soft part, every fear, every truth and still they misread you so badly that it makes you feel so incredibly small. So small that you almost grow paranoid. If the person you loved most couldn’t see your worth, then what if everyone else can’t either?
There is a specific type of wound that forms when the eyes you wanted to feel safest in become the very place you feel judged. When being perceived by someone you love holds so much weight that it begins to determine how deserving you believe you are of being loved by anyone, ever.
And that is the most haunting part of this song. It isn’t just a story about heartbreak. It is the fear that maybe you were never enough to begin with, and the terrifying possibility that the world is secretly hoping that’s true too.