A love poem that opens by admitting that poems don't work is starting from an unusual place. "The poems I wrote left emotions untouched," says the speaker of Anshley's «What it is like to love... Part 1», and the rest of the piece reads like an attempt to touch them at last. The situation is simple. The speaker loves a best friend, hides it inside "friendly" chats, and cannot decide whether honesty is worth the risk. The central idea is that love can trap you between the name you have for someone and the name you want. The speaker's own words are "My best friend is what I call her, / Now in want of a title that'll mean we're closer."
The form suits that trapped feeling. The poem is one unbroken block with no stanza breaks, no steady metre and no regular rhyme scheme, so there is nowhere to pause. The commas fall in odd places, as in "But, what if, it causes dismay," and they make the speech stammer, like someone stopping at the edge of a sentence. The grammar hesitates too, because the poem lives in the "if": "Only if I were to say," "what if," "Could it be," "Perhaps." Rhyme appears only in scraps. "Dismay" chimes with "say," "her" half-rhymes with "closer," and at the very end "need" and "lead" finally land, as if the hope has found its footing. The register shifts between casual ("where we at," "better not say") and formal ("Whom," "resides," "shall"). That fits a speaker rehearsing a grand confession in everyday words.
The imagery is modest but pointed. The quotation marks around 'friendly' suggest that the friendliness is a disguise. The feeling is "untamed," a wild thing kept indoors. Hope is "a tiny speck," while the beloved lives in the speaker's heart as if in a house: "this heart that she resides in." The picture is of a tenant who doesn't know she has moved in.
The middle of the poem is its sharpest stretch. It sets two lives side by side and shows how uneven they are: "While her days pass like they used to before, / My days don't pass without her thoughts." Then comes a run of lines that repeat the same opening. "The things I say, are not the ones she hears / The things I notice, are invisible to her, / The books I read are not the ones she does." The books lead into the poem's best turn: "Perhaps, we are then, on different pages." A reading habit becomes a metaphor for emotional mismatch. The line is gloomy, yet the "Perhaps" leaves room for doubt, and the speaker soon wonders whether she is "unable to tell, to express, to share, just like me."
That list of verbs returns at the end, changed. "Confess, / To express, to speak our hearts out" takes the same word, "express," that earlier named an inability and turns it into something achieved. "Closer" works the same way. It appears as a wish ("we'd be closer"), then as a title ("we're closer"), and finally as "closer and closer," which speeds up until the last line arrives with a bump: "And kiss each other." After so many abstractions like feelings, titles and wants, the plainness of that line is striking. It is the poem's first concrete, physical act, and it is still only imagined, since the grammar stays in the future ("shall," "will").
What gives the poem its value is its honesty rather than polish. The speaker is not a confident romantic hero but someone weighing a risk, afraid to "lose more than I have." Most readers will recognise that arithmetic, and few poems about unspoken love show it so openly, doubts and daydreams included. The poem also holds a quiet irony. Its speaker cannot say any of this to the friend, yet has said all of it here. Whether she ever reads it, the poem doesn't tell us. The ellipsis in the title and the "Part 1" suggest the story is meant to continue, and the unfinished feeling suits a love that hasn't yet found its ending.