Grief rarely announces itself with grand gestures. More often it arrives as restlessness, a low hum with no obvious source. Alex Mclean's "ever since you're gone" starts exactly there, with the plain admission "I've been restless". In five short lines it turns that unease into a small, honest study of loss, and of how memory refuses to take orders.
The central idea is a paradox: the speaker is "Trying to forget" someone, yet that person "just appear[s] out of no where". The effort to forget is itself a way of keeping the person close, since you cannot push away what you are not thinking about. The word "just" matters here. It makes the intrusions casual and unbidden, as if the mind were doing this to the speaker, not the other way around.
The poem has no rhyme and no steady metre, and its shape does much of the work. The lines shrink and swell. The first is only four syllables, the second runs on for about fifteen without a full stop, and the last collapses to three. That long second line feels breathless, like someone talking too fast to avoid the point. Then comes the line break after the comma, and "in my memories" arrives on its own, in lowercase, a sentence continuing as if it had no business starting a new line. The reader is ambushed by the break just as the speaker is ambushed by the memory. The only sound-echo is faint: "memories" and "reality" end on the same soft "ee", a quiet link between the two worlds the poem sets against each other.
That opposition is the poem's main imagery. The person has "faded from my reality" and now lives in "memories". "Appear" suggests something ghostly, an apparition turning up uninvited. "Faded" suggests a photograph losing its colour, a gradual draining and not a sudden break. The poem never says whether the person died, left or simply drifted away, so any more specific story would be guesswork. What the vocabulary does suggest is slowness: a presence thinning out over time while the feeling stays at full strength. The odd spelling "no where" adds to this. Whether or not it was deliberate, the eye reads two separate words, "no" and "where", and the person seems to have lost any place to be.
The title and the grammar fix the poem in time. "ever since you're gone" sets a clock running, and "Since" returns at the start of the fourth line like an echo. Both "I've been" and "you've faded" are in the present perfect, a tense that says something began in the past and has not stopped. Nothing here is finished, and the speaker has no neat "after" to report. The lowercase title and the slightly loose phrasing ("you're gone" where "you've gone" might be expected) give the poem the sound of speech rather than of composition, like something said quietly to oneself.
The ending is where the structure pays off. "I miss you." is pushed far to the right, with white space around it, and works like a held breath or a silence after a confession. Everything before it circles the feeling with abstract words: "restless", "memories", "reality". The last line drops abstraction altogether. It has three syllables, no imagery and no explanation, and it is the only line that does nothing but say what is felt. After all the effort to forget, this is what is left.
The poem's significance lies in this restraint. It gives no names, places or causes, which means almost any reader can fill the gap with their own loss. The same openness limits it, because it doesn't offer the specific detail that makes some elegies unforgettable. For a student reader, though, it shows how much can be done without ornament. Line length, a line break and a patch of empty page can carry as much feeling as any metaphor. It also says something true that is easy to forget: missing someone is not a decision, and the mind goes on returning to them whatever we intend.