Elle's poem has no title, only a row of asterisks, which suits a text about fading out. It describes a "she" who has stopped trying to be seen. Its central idea is a bleak piece of logic: once she gives up grieving for the softer, prettier version of herself, nothing is left for anyone else to grieve either. The final line, "That's why she won't be missed," makes the point with its "why". It sounds less like self-pity than like a conclusion reached after a long, tired calculation.
The first stanza sets two kinds of atmosphere against each other. "Flowery mist" belongs to soft-focus, romantic writing: it blurs edges, flatters, and hides. "Transparent air" is its opposite, clear and plain, and easy to look straight through. The speaker says "there was no flowery mist / anymore," so what has been lost is a kind of glamorous haze, and what remains is exposure that is also a form of vanishing. I read the air as a quiet detail too: it is necessary to life, yet nobody notices it.
The opening lines are cleverly double-edged. "She was never perfect / Just wanting to be" can mean that she only wanted to be perfect and failed. Because of the line break, though, "Just wanting to be" can also stand alone, as the wish simply to be, to exist. The second stanza picks this up with "Most people want to exist," so what looked like a failed ambition to be flawless may be a much more basic hope for presence, one she has now dropped.
There is no regular rhyme, but a hidden chime runs through the poem. "Mist" in the third line is a homophone of "missed" in the last, and "exist" nearly rhymes with both. The vanished mist comes back at the end as the word for what nobody will feel about her. The verb "missing" does similar work. In "Missing being flowy is just a waste of time" it could mean longing for softness or failing at it, and both readings fit her weariness. By the final line the word has passed from her own action to other people's, who will not do it.
The rhythm is free and uneven. The first stanza's lines are short, almost whispered. The second stretches into longer, prose-like lines, as if she is explaining herself. Then come the fragments "anymore" and "at this point," each alone on its own lowercase line, like sighs the speaker cannot be bothered to attach to a sentence. Each answers the question "when?", and between them they give the poem the feel of a long wearing-down rather than a sudden break. "Missing being flowy is just a waste of time" is the longest line in the poem, and it deflates into "at this point," like a breath let out.
The diction is flat on purpose. "Flowy" is casual, nearly slangy, the word you might use for a dress or someone's hair, and it sits oddly beside "transparent." The little word "just" returns three times: "Just wanting to be," "Just some transparent air," "just a waste of time." Each time it shrinks something, her wish, her surroundings, her longing. "Some" in "some transparent air" shrugs in the same way. Even "most people" is blandly statistical, setting her apart from a crowd she no longer bothers to join.
Telling the story in the third person adds distance, as if someone is describing her from outside, matching her own detachment. The name attached to the poem, Elle, is the French word for "she," which may tempt readers to see a self-portrait. That is only an inference, and the poem works either way.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It takes the stock vocabulary of poetry, flowers and mist, and shows it being drained away, and its force comes from understatement. It is unsettling partly because it sounds so reasonable. It also leaves open whether "doesn't care" means freedom from the pressure to be perfect or a numbness that has set in. That ambiguity is where each reader's own response begins.