From the album Golden Age
This is a song about someone who's convinced herself that claiming transformation makes it real, even when she can't name a single thing that's actually different. The bridge promises she'll stop waiting to be happy when she's old and fight the waves, but the outro returns word-for-word to the intro's language of forgetting the way and asking someone not to get tired of her. The revelation produces no movement.
All I do is waste and decline, waiting for that age of my life / When I'm old and love is all that I'll need
She's postponing emotional availability until old age, treating love as something she'll be ready for later while actively wasting the present. The plan is to wait until she's destroyed enough that she won't have other options.
Holding out like a dog they've yet to put down / I whore out my tears and just keep wasting the best of my years
She casts herself as an animal waiting for euthanasia, framing survival as passive endurance rather than choice. The verb 'whore out' turns grief into a performance she's selling, which means even her pain isn't actually hers.
Got what I wanted but it's never enough for me / I'm so beautiful and it's wasted on me
She claims she got what she wanted while cataloging nothing but deprivation, suggesting what she wanted was actually the deprivation itself. Beauty being 'wasted on me' means she's turned her own attractiveness into the reason she deserves to stay stuck.
Do you just want my blood? Am I just that damn hard to love? / 'Cause it feels like all I have is still just not enough
The question 'am I just that damn hard to love' puts the blame on herself for other people hurting her, treating her difficulty as the explanation for mistreatment. She's asking if she's the problem, which means she's already decided she is.
I don't have to wait to be happy when I'm old, and oh / And that one of these days, I'll find a way / To fight the waves, embrace the pain
This reads like the moment of realization, the turn toward change. But 'one of these days' keeps the transformation perpetually future tense, and the outro proves she hasn't moved an inch from where the song started.
The whole song is structured as a journey from paralysis to revelation, but the outro repeating the intro verbatim means she never left the opening. She can articulate the problem perfectly, can even name what needs to change, but knowing what's wrong and doing something about it turn out to be completely unrelated skills. What she wanted was permission to stay exactly where she is.