Everyone knows what "once upon a time" is for. It stands at the door of a story and tells us that what follows is invented, so we can relax. brooklynn's poem begins by distrusting that signal and ends somewhere no fairy tale would go.
The opening stanza is a little tangled, and the tangle is revealing. "They say it's a story / By starting with / Such a line": the grammar wobbles, as if the speaker is thinking while writing instead of polishing. "They" stands for convention, the voices that decide a certain phrase turns a tale into fiction. Against them the speaker sets a small, stubborn piece of logic: "It happened / So it should be / Once upon a time." The phrase should mark something that is past, not something that is false. Real things happened once too, and the argument is plain enough to be hard to wave away.
Then it slides. If the phrase can't prove a story untrue, maybe nothing proves anything true: "Though maybe it / All is made up." The word "it" is slippery. It begins as the story and quietly widens to mean everything. "Perhaps we aren't / Even here" lands hard partly because "Even here" sits alone on its line, as though the speaker were pointing at the ground underfoot and doubting it. The evidence for reality is offered in the most human terms available: "The people you meet / The memories you've had." The poem doesn't reach for science or philosophy. It reaches for relationships and remembered moments, which suggests these are what the speaker actually stands to lose.
The form supports this uncertainty. There is no rhyme and no punctuation at all, and the lines are only two to four words long. Without full stops the thoughts spill into one another, so the speaker never gets to settle on a conclusion. The vocabulary is full of hedges ("maybe" twice, "Perhaps," "Though"), which makes the few firm words stand out: "It happened," and "truly," used twice. Sound plays a small part too. The poem doesn't rhyme, but a long *i* runs through its first lines in "By," "line," "I," "lie" and "time." Whether or not it was planned, it ties together the three things the speaker is wrestling with: the "line" that opens a story, the "lie" it might be, and the "time" it claims to belong to.
The pronouns also shift, and they trace the poem's emotional path. It starts with "They," moves to "I," turns to the reader with "you," gathers everyone into "we," and finally steps back to "people." An argument with other voices becomes a private worry, then a shared one, then an observation about humanity. The fear is not mainly about whether the universe is real. It is about being "alone." The metaphysical doubt turns out to be an emotional one. If the people and memories are made up, nobody is there with us.
The understatement helps. "Something to think about / And also scary" is almost comically plain, but that plainness makes the fear feel honest instead of performed. The last stanza pushes the idea further: "In this world / Where people / Are already / Desperate." The key word is "already." Loneliness would not arrive in a calm world. It would be added to a burden that is already there. The poem stops on "Desperate" with no full stop and no consolation, the opposite of the "happily ever after" that its title would normally promise.
The poem is worth reading for how much it does with so few words. It takes the most familiar phrase in storytelling and shows that it can carry a real question, how we know what is real, without any technical language. It also answers that question with a feeling instead of an argument: whatever the truth is, we need the people and memories to be real. The ending leaves the thought unfinished, and we never learn what might reassure the speaker. That open ending keeps the doubt honest, and a reader may finish the poem looking at the people around them a little differently.