Most poems about friendship try to convince us it is real. This one begins by telling us not to believe it. "don't trust me when i say we're best friends" is a strange opening, because the speaker is warning a listener against her own words. The poem is a short, anxious confession about how fragile affection is, and about how easily the signs of closeness (the label, the jewellery, the promise) can come apart from the feeling they are supposed to prove.
The first three lines build a small case for the friendship, and they climb as they go. First comes the label, "best friends", then a physical object, "matching necklaces", then a claim about preference: "i'd rather spend time with you than anyone else." Each item sounds more personal than the one before, yet each is also something a person can simply say or buy. The repeated "or" makes the lines feel like a list of evidence being offered and then withdrawn. The title's "BFFs", an abbreviation from texting and friendship bracelets, sets up the same cheerful, slightly childish register that the poem then dismantles.
The turn comes with "because nothing lasts forever and". The line stops on a dangling "and", as if the speaker has run out of nerve or breath, and what follows is shattered into fragments: "love can be" and then, one word per line, "faked", "unrequited", "empty". The poem physically narrows here, from long conversational lines to single words stacked down the page. The shape resembles a staircase, or a voice getting quieter.
The three words are well chosen, and they are not synonyms. "Faked" suggests someone is acting, which is deliberate deception. "Unrequited" removes the villain: nobody has to lie for love to go unanswered. "Empty" is quieter still, a state rather than an act, in which the feeling has simply drained out. The speaker moves from love as performance to love as imbalance to love as hollow space. Notice too that the opening claim, that nothing lasts forever, is about time, but the list that follows is not. It says love can be faked, unrequited or empty even while it lasts. The poem's fear is therefore less that friendship will end than that it was never what it appeared to be.
That fear points back at the speaker, and this is the poem's cleverest turn. If love can be faked, then her own declarations are under suspicion as well, which explains the opening "don't trust me." It is unclear whether she is being brutally honest or defending herself in advance against being hurt or found out. Both readings work, and the poem lets them sit side by side.
The form supports this uncertainty. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, not even for "i", so the speaker seems small and the voice sounds like a message typed quickly. Judging by the casual diction, it is a young, contemporary voice, though the poem gives us no way to know more than that. The whole thing is one unpunctuated sentence, and the missing full stop matters. Poems usually close with a sense of settling, but this one ends on "empty" and then white space, so the page itself finishes the thought. Sound plays a part as well. "Faked" ends on a hard, clipped consonant, "unrequited" is the longest word and stretches out, and "empty" fades away on a soft vowel, so the last three words seem to lose energy as we read them.
One more detail invites careful speculation. The name attached to the poem is "Ancient Artifact", and it is tempting to read it ironically, since an artifact is exactly the kind of thing that does last, while the poem insists nothing does. That is only an inference from the name, but it adds a wry layer to a text about the gap between what endures and what merely looks durable.
The poem matters because it takes a sentimental, almost throwaway genre, the best-friend declaration, and turns it inside out in just a few lines. It does not offer comfort or a lesson. Instead it admits something many readers have felt privately: that saying "i care about you" and meaning it are not always the same act, and that we cannot always tell, in ourselves or in others, which one is happening.