The first line carries a contradiction that the rest of the poem keeps unpacking: "we've yet to be anything but strangers." The speaker has been close enough to hope, and the other person keeps promising that things will change, yet nothing has actually started. Closeness is claimed and denied in the same breath. The poem is about that gap, and about the speaker's slow, uncomfortable realisation that the gap may be the point. By the final line, what looked like a complaint about someone else's unreliability has become a question about the speaker's own desire: "or maybe it's the chase."
The poem moves through three stages. It begins with a specific "you," the person making promises. Then, around "maybe i have a thing for getting so close," the focus swings to the speaker, who describes a pattern of "loving someone who's incapable of loving me." Finally, "you" changes meaning. In "you fall for it" and "you never are," the word no longer points at the unreliable lover. It reads as the speaker talking to themselves, or to anyone who has done this before. That shift from accusation to self-address makes the poem feel like someone thinking aloud and catching themselves mid-thought.
The form suits that feeling. There is no regular metre and almost no consistent rhyme, so the lines sound like speech. The long sentence about drifting, "we'd drift away with the currents, like every other day," runs on without a full stop, and the sentence itself seems to drift. The current image is quietly effective. Nobody ends the relationship, and nobody decides anything. The two people are simply carried apart, which matches the poem's picture of a connection that never had enough weight to hold anyone in place.
Line breaks do careful work too. "all i've ever known were," stops on its verb, and the reader waits a beat for the noun. What arrives is "empty promises, and lies," a list with nothing in it, which echoes the word "empty." The comma before "and lies" slows the line further, as if the speaker is reluctant to say the last word.
The one clear rhyme, "surprise" and "guys," stands out because the rest of the poem avoids rhyme. "It should be no surprise that i fall for these types of guys" has a slightly sing-song, self-mocking bounce. It sounds like the speaker shrugging off pain with a joke, a way of getting ahead of anyone else's judgement. The tone is brief and flippant before the poem turns serious again.
The most telling image comes in "the ones who give you just enough attention to keep you attached." The phrase "just enough" suggests careful rationing, and "attached" sounds like something hooked on a line. Together they hint at fishing or baiting, though the poem never says so outright. Then the poem complicates its own picture. The speaker tells themselves, "i won't put my heart in it this time, i'm prepared," and answers flatly, "but you never are." The short sentence cuts off the self-deception. Preparation fails because the speaker still wants the thing being withheld.
That is why the ending lands as it does. The title, «the chase.», comes with a full stop, as if it were a verdict. The last line, though, is lowercase, unpunctuated and hedged with "maybe." It does not finish the thought, and the poem is more honest for it. If the pursuit itself is the attraction, then the lover's failure to commit stops being a betrayal and becomes a condition of the whole thing. Someone who delivered on every promise might end the excitement. The speaker half-sees this and does not look away.
The poem's interest lies in this refusal of an easy conclusion. It could have stayed a straightforward complaint about empty promises, but it turns and questions the one making the complaint. The word "loose" in "i loose a little more faith" is probably a slip for "lose," though it could be read as faith slackening like a rope. Whichever it is, the image fits a speaker whose hold on hope is gradually loosening and who is, even so, still holding on.