Nobody can simply decide to forget someone, and that is the quiet trap in the opening line of "I need." The speaker, who writes under the name escape_artist, announces a task: "I need to forget about you." The verb is *need*, not *will* or *have*. A need is something not yet met. So the poem is not the record of someone who has moved on. It is a person talking themselves toward moving on, and every mention of "you" keeps that person on the page.
The second line shows how much the speaker is still stuck. "The way you forgot about me" has the same eight syllables as the line before and nearly the same words. Only the verb and the pronoun change, from "forget" to "forgot" and from "you" to "me." The poem sets up a mirror: the speaker wants to do to the other person exactly what was done to them. The tenses mark the distance between them. "Forgot" is finished and "forget" is still a hope, so the other person got there first. The word "way" adds to the sting, because it points to the manner of the forgetting, which seems casual and effortless, as well as the fact of it. The line is also a fragment with no verb of its own, and it hangs there like something the speaker can't quite finish saying.
Lines three and four shorten to five syllables each, and the pace turns brisk. "I need to drop you" is a deliberately unromantic verb. You drop a class, a bad habit, a bag that has got too heavy, and there is no ceremony in it. "And never look back" follows as a clean exit. But "never" is a big word for a speaker who has just admitted they still *need* to forget. "Never look back" is also a stock phrase, and its familiarity makes it sound less like a feeling and more like a slogan the speaker is repeating for courage.
The last three lines change the poem's shape. Until now the sentences have been short and separate, each ending in a full stop. Here a comma links them into one longer sentence, as if the speaker, having made the demand, finally has to reason it through. "I will be fine" shifts to the future tense and sounds like reassurance. Then comes the book metaphor: "I was a page in your book, / You were a chapter in mine." On the surface this is a consoling comparison, since a page is lost easily and a chapter can be closed. But the sum quietly gives the game away. A chapter is much longer than a page, which means the speaker mattered less to the other person than the other mattered to them. The small word "As" does double duty here. It can mean "just as," so that the speaker will be fine in the same way the other person was. It can also mean "because," so that the speaker's comfort rests on a loss that hurts. The lowercase "i" in "As i was" may be a typo, but if it is deliberate, it makes the speaker even smaller on the page.
The book image also works through familiar idioms: to turn the page, to close a chapter. Both promise that a life goes on, and the speaker clings to that promise. The poem has no regular rhyme scheme, which suits its plain, speaking voice, but one rhyme does appear. "Fine" in line five meets "mine" in line seven, and the pairing links being all right to owning one's own story. The poem ends on "mine" after "your book," so the final possessive pulls the story back to the speaker. The rhyme is also slightly too tidy, like a cover snapped shut a moment before the reader can see what's inside.
What makes the poem worth reading is the gap between what it says and what it shows. The speaker says they will be fine, yet the whole poem is spent keeping count of who forgot whom and whose part was bigger. The vocabulary is almost entirely everyday and mostly one syllable, and that plainness makes the feeling believable. Even the handle escape_artist, whether or not it was chosen with this poem in mind, fits a speaker trying to slip out of a bond. Seven short lines are enough to capture a feeling many readers will know: wanting to match someone else's indifference, and finding that wanting it is the proof you haven't managed it yet.