A speaker tries to work out why one person mattered so much and keeps answering with small physical details: a smile, a laugh, a shade of hair. For three stanzas it sounds like the beginning of a crush. Then the last stanza admits, "you thought this was a love poem," and adds that "in a way it kind of is," because the love is self-love. The central idea is that the person we watch most closely, and who most needs that attention, may be ourselves. Noticing our own small changes can be what finally eases loneliness.
The construction is plain and deliberate. There are four quatrains in free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre, so the lines stretch and shrink the way speech does. Repetition holds it together. The first three stanzas open with nearly the same sentence, "I think it had something to do with the way she smiled / laughed / her dark blue hair." The hedge "I think" and the vague "something" give the voice the sound of someone looking back and still unsure of the cause. Each stanza's last line is shorter and moves the focus from "she" to "I": "I, however, have always been there," "I have always laughed with her mind," "These changes I noticed the most." The speaker is the constant witness, and the ending makes us reread that role.
The imagery tracks a change from hiding to openness. In the first stanza the smile is private, almost illicit. She smiles over a book or a friend's text and looks around "hoping no one caught her in the act," a phrase that treats happiness like a minor crime. By the second stanza the hiding is gone, and she throws her head back with "absolutely no cares in the world." Then comes the strangest line in the poem: "Her whole body would darken like a paler shade of red." Taken literally it contradicts itself, since something can't darken and grow paler at once. As a picture of a blush, though, it works, because a blush is both a deepening and a faint, passing colour. The odd phrase "laughed with her mind" also suggests a laughter shared inside the head rather than out loud, a closeness stranger than ordinary friendship.
The third stanza turns the change into movement. The hair seems to change ("became much like the deep ocean tides"), and her confidence grows with it, rising like water. Then the vocabulary climbs: she holds her head "up higher to the high sky." The words "high," "higher" and "high" stack up so the line lifts as we read it. The image goes from deep water to open air, and it answers the thrown-back head of stanza two. The head that tipped back in unguarded laughter is now kept up on purpose, which suggests steadiness rather than a passing mood.
The final stanza breaks the pattern. The refrain disappears and the poem speaks to a "you." Its logic is a little slippery: "Thanks to myself, I do not feel so alone anymore. / And for that, I thank you the most." The thanks swings from "myself" to "you," so "you" could be the reader who stayed to the end. Judging by the rest of the poem, it could also be the earlier self, the "she" who smiled in secret and is now the one being thanked. I find the second reading more convincing, because it explains why the speaker "has always been there" and why the laughter happens "with her mind." The repeated "the most" links noticing and gratitude. What the speaker "noticed the most" in stanza three becomes who they "thank the most" in stanza four.
The poem's significance lies in what it does with a familiar form. Love poems often list the beloved's features, and this one keeps that habit while turning the gaze inward. It is also modest in tone. "Kind of" and "after all" make the claim sound like a quiet realisation rather than a lecture. For a student reader it is a good example of how a late twist can change the meaning of earlier lines, and how simple wording and repetition can carry a feeling that is hard to say directly: the relief of finding company in oneself.