Most of Cee Ellis's poem is spent circling a question rather than answering it. It opens with "Why do people change?" and then offers guesses: maybe people mature, maybe they want to fit in, maybe they change for love, for rejection, or out of dislike for themselves. Then the guessing stops. The poem says something plainer and harder: "People change. / And we did." Its central idea is that the reasons matter less than the fact of change, and that this fact stops being abstract the moment the speaker has to say "we."
The order of the explanations matters. "Do they mature?" is the flattering, textbook answer, and it gets only four syllables. "Or try to fit in?" is less kind, since it hints at pressure and a loss of self. Then come the relationships, and here the poem becomes more vulnerable. People might change for "somebody they like," but also for "somebody who didn't like them / They way they were." (The printed "They way" looks like a slip for "The way," but the line still reads clearly.) That second option is a sad one, because it means changing in response to being found lacking. The final explanation removes other people altogether: "Because they don't like themselves / The way they are." The list begins with a tidy, public reason and ends with a private one.
That last phrase deserves attention because it echoes the earlier one. "The way they were" and "the way they are" are almost the same words, but the verb tense and the judge have shifted. In the first, someone else's dislike belongs to the past. In the second, the dislike is the person's own, and it is happening now. The poem suggests that outside rejection can turn into self-rejection, though it never says so directly. The repeated "somebody" adds to this. It is a vague word, and the speaker never names or describes anyone. Nobody has a face here, and that blankness lets readers fill the gap with their own people.
The form is as unadorned as the language. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short and sound like speech, and the punctuation makes the thinking stop and start. Many lines begin with small connecting words ("Or," "Maybe," "Because," "But," "And"), which gives the feeling of someone working out a thought aloud, adding and retracting as they go. The poem also has almost no imagery in the usual sense, with no metaphor and no picture of weather, rooms or faces. That plainness is a choice. It makes the poem feel more like an admission than a performance. The one word it leans on is "change," which appears four times, always as a verb. The poem never says what anyone changed into, or what was gained or lost, so the word stays bare and slightly uneasy.
The turn comes with "But." Up to that point the poem has been generous, entertaining every possible reason. "But no matter the reasons" shuts that exploration down. "People change" then repeats the opening phrase with "Why do" removed, so the question becomes a statement. The poem has not solved the puzzle. It has stopped asking it.
The last line carries the most weight. "And we did" is the shortest line in the poem, and it makes two moves at once. Until now everyone has been "they" and "people," a safe distance from the speaker. "We" pulls the speaker into the picture and suggests that someone else is there too. The text does not say who, but the pronoun implies a shared experience, perhaps two people who altered in ways that mattered to each other. The past tense "did" gives it a quiet sense of finality, and the opening "And" makes it sound like something added reluctantly after a pause. Nothing in the line tells us whether the change was good or bad.
That refusal to judge is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats a question everyone asks, usually when something has gone wrong or simply gone by, and it avoids a moral. Change might be growth, conformity, love or self-doubt, and the poem lets all of these stand. What it insists on is honesty. It is easy to wonder why other people changed, but harder to say "we."