The singer is difficult to read. This may be deliberate, a ruse intended to prevent the listener from seeing (or hearing) her too clearly. Or it may be a reflection of her own state of confusion. Either way, it suits her.
There’s a paradox at the center of this song. The two core figures swirl around each other, never truly meeting, only appearing and reappearing as mutually incompatible forms. Everything is misdirection. This is the relationship as psychological hall of mirrors, or as labyrinth:
I haven’t given you what you need.You wanted me but couldn’t reach me.So you went into your memory,Relived all the ways you still want me.I haven’t given you what you need.You wanted me but couldn’t reach me.I’m sorry, it should’ve been me.
At first, this appears to be a straightforward account of a relationship’s dissolution. The singer’s admission of failure – “I haven’t given you what you need” – is a simple statement of fact. It’s clear that she was inaccessible to her lover; just as clear is her expression of regret. But there’s a slipperiness here, a kind of impersonality that increases the distance between the singer, her lover, and the listener. The images are Cubist; they don’t quite fit together. They’re just refracted enough.
Part of the confusion is spatial. The lover retreats into memory so totally that it sublimates his reality. His desire isn’t remembered, but relived. The relationship in that space, concocted from a mixture of memory and desire (could this be an oblique reference to the opening of The Waste Land?), is a grim mirror of one that should have been. A relationship that does not exist. The lover’s interiority has closed him off from his reality – but then, the singer is trapped in an unreality of her own:
I’d be going ‘bout my day until a handWould come and lift me outAnd drop me in the middle of a labyrinthWhere I’d be stuck a while.
The singer’s dislocation has blocked her off from her lover. As she puts it, “Must be lonely loving someone / trying to find their way out of a maze.” What they do is not really loving – or living – and it’s the singer’s recognition of this feeling that brings about her “overwhelming clean feeling / strange serenity.”
But, inside the “clean feeling,” there’s a mystery. “It should’ve been me,” the singer laments. Well, what should’ve? The referent here is not entirely clear.
There are a few possibilities. It could be that the singer regrets being unavailable to her lover, in that she couldn’t receive the love he was trying to give her. She “should’ve been” a version of herself capable of being loved – perhaps even the idealized version of herself, fashioned from memory and desire, that he’s since constructed in his mind.
The catalyst of the singer’s realization is seeing “the girl looked just like me.” At first, it appears the lover has found himself someone else to love, someone similar enough to the singer to spark her epiphany.
But is “the girl” someone else? Or is she the singer herself? Both the singer and her lover are interior, ambiguous, uncertain of their hold on objective reality. “The girl” may look just like the singer because the lover is still pining for her, but she may look just like the singer because she is the singer – the idealized version of herself her lover is pining for, a past version of herself she no longer recognizes, or some other secret self, emerging just long enough to be spotted before vanishing once again.