Distance usually gets blamed in love poems, but Brittany Allen's untitled poem refuses to blame it. The speaker is separated from the person they love. The poem never says why, but "homesick for one another," "a day with you here" and "the distance" all point to a gap in space. Instead of treating that gap as an enemy, the speaker argues with the usual wisdom about it. "They say distance is hard and time is a blessing, / no." The central idea is that distance is not a punishment to endure but "a measure of strength," proof of how far someone is willing to go.
The opening image does most of the work. The sea "used to feel like a void keeping me away," a blank, empty barrier. Then comes a quiet revision: "I realise it's a journey I must take, / one to get to you." The sea hasn't changed. The speaker's reading of it has. A wall becomes a road, and the word "void" returns later in a very different sense: every smile and word "fills a void I didn't know I had." The emptiness outside the speaker, the sea, is answered by an emptiness inside, now filled. That echo links the physical gap to the emotional one and suggests that crossing the first is how the second gets healed.
"Measure" also repeats, which gives the poem a small logic of its own. Distance is a measure of strength, and later "Forever is an impossible amount of time to measure but I want it with you." Space and time, the two things that separate people, are both things the speaker is willing to take on, even when they can't be fully counted.
The form is free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre. Lines stretch and shorten as a thought demands, so the poem sounds like someone talking, or writing a letter, more than performing. The punctuation is loose in a way that feels deliberate. Early lines begin in lowercase, there is a clipped "no." and a double full stop in "space..", and a comma splice runs "distance isn't hard it is a measure of strength" into one breath. Later the capitals arrive ("The first time you said you loved me"), as though the speaker has grown steadier and more formal as the feeling deepens. The ellipses in "anything... anything" and "every second counts..." leave the voice trailing off, short of words.
The strongest rhythmic device is repetition. "I want" opens four lines in a row, and the list is surprising: "the endless smiles and laughing," but also "the hard days," "the arguments and the tears." The speaker isn't asking for a perfect romance. They want the whole difficult thing, and the stanza ends by saying "you are worth the laughter, the distance and the tears," where distance sits in the list beside ordinary emotions. A similar pull runs through "always, / always the last person I talk to," where the line break itself makes the word return.
Weight is the other recurring image. When the beloved says "I love you," the speaker feels "the weight of the world ease," trusting that this person will "carry that weight with me forever." Love here is practical rather than glittering. It is shared load-bearing, and that fits the poem's idea of strength, since crossing the sea and carrying a burden are both physical, effortful acts.
The ending is understated. After all the big claims ("I'd run, climb anything"), the final wish is small: "your hand in mine and your arms around me." Judging by the imagery, the speaker's longing is for touch, which a distant relationship can't supply. The last line, "for the first time in a long time this feels real and irreplaceable," lands as quiet relief rather than celebration.
The poem's significance lies in its honesty and its reversal. It doesn't polish the pain of separation, and it doesn't pretend love is easy. It takes a familiar situation and gives it a new meaning, so that the thing that keeps two people apart becomes the evidence of what they'd do for each other. That is a hopeful way to think about any gap, and the plain language makes it feel earned rather than rehearsed.