Is Taylor Swift's "The Manuscript" About John Mayer?

After months of anticipation, Taylor Swift dropped her long-awaited The Tortured Poets Department at midnight on Friday, Apr. 19 – and the album lived up to her statement that “All’s fair in love and poetry” with plenty of shout-outs to her exes. In addition to possible nods to Joe Alwyn on “So Long, London Boy" and "Florida!!!", the “Getaway Car” singer’s 11th LP surprisingly featured a number of songs that appear to be dedicated to her whirlwind romance with Matt Healy (and the public’s opinion about the 1975 frontman).

Just hours later, Swift appeared to go back even further into the archives by dropping “The Manuscript," one of 15 additional tracks on The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. 

“I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past two years and wanted to share it all with you, so here’s the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology,” the “Cruel Summer” singer wrote in an accompanying post on Instagram. “15 extra songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.”

Swifties hungrily dissected the new tracks upon their release, and theories began to swirl that “The Manuscript” is actually about her romance and break up with John Mayer, whom she briefly dated from late 2009 to early 2010 when she was 19 and the “Gravity” singer was 32.

The single starts with Swift reflecting back on a past relationship. “Now and then, she re-reads the manuscript of the entire torrid affair,” she sings, sharing a memory of a mystery man’s smooth lines, including him telling her that “if the sex was half as good as the conversation was, soon they’d be pushing strollers.”

The “Karma” star then appeared to reference the couple’s significant age gap and her being child-like: “In the age of him, she wished she was thirty… afterward, she only ate kids’ cereal, and couldn’t sleep unless it was in her mother’s bed.”

Swift has previously alluded to this sentiment in “Dear John” – “Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?” – and “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve,” where she looks back and says, “And I damn sure would’ve never danced with the devil At 19… and now that I’m grown, I’m scared of ghosts."

In “Manuscript,” she reflected in a similar vein, singing, “She thought about how he said since she was so wise beyond her years, everything had been above board. She wasn't sure.” Following the couple's break up, she “dated boys who were her own age” – a seeming reference to Connor Kennedy and Harry Styles, whom she was romantically linked to shortly after her split.

At the end of the song, Swift took a walk down (romantic) memory lane and revealed that she’d moved on from the experience. “Looking backwards might be the only way to move forward,” she sang. “And at last, she knew what the agony had been for.”

“Now and then, I reread the manuscript, but the story isn’t mine anymore,” she concluded, referencing the last line in her Anthology Instagram post.

While only time will tell whether Swift confirms who “Manuscript” — or any of her songs — is about, the “Red” singer revealed that the release of The Tortured Poets Department was the end of a chapter for her.

“This period of the author’s life is now over; the chapter closed and boarded up,” she wrote in an Apr. 19 post on Instagram. “There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed.” She continued, “This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it. And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry.”

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