Grief often shows up as a habit of the mind, and this speaker's habit is pretending. "I sometimes pretend your arms are still around me," she says, and then, "I sometimes pretend your hand is still in mine." The poem is about what remains once a relationship has gone: no person, only a stock of sensations replayed in the dark. The reason for the absence is never given. "Since you're gone" could mean a breakup or something more final, though the question "Do you ever pretend?" suggests the other person is still somewhere to be asked. The poem's central idea sits in its repeated line, "My love my love, my pain." Love and pain are not set against each other here. They are the same thing, and the speaker can no longer name one without the other.
That refrain is the poem's backbone. It appears four times, like a hand returning to a bruise, and each time it follows a memory or a wish. The grammar matters. The first "my love" has no comma to separate it from the second, so the words tumble out in one breath. The comma before "my pain" works as a hinge, and the phrase drops from address to admission. There is no "and" or "but" between love and pain, so the line simply places the two words side by side and lets them stand as equals.
Around the refrain, the poem is free verse with no regular metre and no rhyme scheme. Its shape comes from repetition. "I sometimes pretend" appears twice, "I remember" three times, and "When we kissed" twice more. These repeated openings make the poem feel like a list the speaker keeps going back over, adding nothing new because nothing new can happen. The two direct questions, "Do you ever pretend?" and "Do you remember?", turn the poem toward the absent lover. They also show the speaker's loneliness, since no answer comes. Tense moves in a telling way as well: the early lines pretend in the present, while the middle and later ones remember in the past. The speaker slides from clinging to the present to looking back, as if the pretending has stopped working.
The imagery is mostly physical and close up. The speaker remembers "your hand on my waist," "the sound of your heartbeat when we danced," and her head "softly placed" on a chest. Touch and hearing dominate, which is how intimacy feels from inside it. The kiss "in silence surrounded by trees" adds a contrast: silence outdoors, a heartbeat indoors, and nothing needed in either place. The scenes also differ in size. The basement, "where nights never seemed to end," is enclosed and private, and the phrase suggests time dissolving into happiness. Then the poem opens up to "starry skies." Judging by these images, the relationship felt both secret and boundless. The word "never" hints at an irony, too, because the nights that once refused to end now belong to someone who has "stopped smiling." The poem doesn't say so, but it is easy to imagine the nights still feeling endless for a different reason.
The ending is the most interesting choice. After three refrains, the fourth lands in the middle of the final stanza, and the poem does not close on it. The last line is "I miss your golden eyes," with no full stop and no repeated "my pain." The refrain, a kind of formula, finally gives way to a plain statement and a single specific detail. "Golden" carries warmth and light, and it echoes the "starry skies" just before it, so the lover's eyes seem to take over the brightness of the night sky. It also happens that "skies" and "eyes" rhyme, the only real rhyme in the poem, so the ending feels briefly like a chime after all that unrhymed lines.
The poem's significance lies in its plainness. Nothing here is elaborately metaphorical, and the grammar even slips, as in "I stopped smiling since you're gone," the way speech does under pressure. But that directness is what lets a reader recognise the feeling: the replayed memories, the unanswerable questions, and the way one small detail, a colour in someone's eyes, can hold all of the loss.