Warning

Warning is and will forever be one of my favorite songs. Ever. Let me explain why. There was this girl who rode my bus. I had noticed her for years, and just last year, I gained the courage to try to be friends with her. Almost immediately, I began calling her every night, talking to her every morning, and overall just becoming really attached to her. She tolerated it, and actually, we became best friends, because she didn’t talk to many people either, for reasons I never understood. I learned that she had a Spotify account, so I made a playlist for her and while searching for songs I stumbled upon this one. It was the first in the playlist. So she knows this song too. Anyways, after some time…. I decided I loved her and didn’t tell her… began to get a little psycho on her. I got jealous if she was talking to somebody else. I began getting self-conscious and overthinking things. I even hacked into her email, to find out that… She didn’t want to be even my friend anymore. And I felt hurt. Badly hurt. It took a lot of writing and fanfiction to get better. I think this song is for people like me. For the people who are handfuls. For the people who are empty, and sometimes depressed, and for the people who are sometimes creepy and wants to stop but can’t. This song is like a warning to the people who get close to them. At least, that’s how I feel.

i feel weird attaching my own interpretation to a song on a record that's been spelled out in interviews as being about real things that really happened to real people, but setting that aside for a moment:

"Hope you're telling me the truth Getting goosebumps on your roof Friendship's the biggest myth Heart is skipping like a Cessna stalling out and falling free Live in the space between Call the cat in from the dark Singing born free from the porch My love lives on A positive sobriety birthday A fifth remission anniversary"

this verse (along with parts of the chorus) seems to describe two people who feel more for one another than friendship and whose feelings lie somewhere in between platonic love and the emotional aspect of romantic love, and how this has lasted years after one of the characters has died.

i personally don't think there's a distinction between the love you feel for your close friends and the love you feel for your romantic partners (apart from the fact that the latter often comes w/ sexual attraction) but there's a strong imposed dichotomy between the two that prevents a lot of people from realizing and articulating their feelings. imo, that's what "live in the space between" refers to.

i doubt that's the authorial intent of the song but i don't really care about authorial intent anymore.