"it starts in your chest doesn't it?" The poem opens with a question that doesn't wait for an answer. The speaker assumes you already know the feeling, and that assumption pulls the reader into a shared secret. The poem never names a cause for the hurt. "It" stays an unnamed pronoun throughout, and that vagueness is deliberate in effect: the poem is less about what happened than about what pain does once it is inside a body, and what the speaker slowly realises about her own reaction to it.
The central idea is a disturbing reversal. Pain is supposed to be the thing we want to escape, yet the poem traces how it can dissolve into numbness, and how that numbness can start to feel like relief. "It feels good / it feels numbing / … it feels amazing." The repeated "it feels" builds a rhythm of gradual surrender, with "good" sliding into "numbing" and then into "amazing". The speaker moves from suffering to something close to bliss without noticing the crossing point. The poem is about that blindness, and the final questions are an attempt to find the moment she missed.
The ocean is the main image, and it works because it is both large and liquid. The waves are "tidal waves inside your bones," so the sea has been moved inside the body. Pain "curls around your fingertips," slips "up and down your arms" and drips "down your stomach to your legs," so it behaves less like a blow than like water finding every low place. The sound of the lines supports this: "splashing and crashing" is a crowd of crashing consonants, and the repeated list "your heart / your lungs / your bones / your soul" reads like wave after wave hitting the same shore. The verb "washing" returns twice, first as "washing over your soul" and later as "the numbness washing you out." The second use is more sinister. To be washed out is to have colour drained away, and the word quietly turns the cleansing wave into an erasing one.
Structurally, the poem is free verse. It has no rhyme scheme and no punctuation apart from question marks, and everything is in lowercase. The short, unpunctuated lines let the sentences flow as the waves do, while the stanzas shift in length and mood. The third stanza is the calmest, with its soft repeated "sensation" in "a calming sensation / a nothingness sensation." Then comes the sharpest turn: "then it's 3 in the morning." After so much abstraction, the exact hour grounds the poem in a real bedroom and a real night. Here the inner ocean finally reaches the surface as "tears … pouring down your cheeks," so the water imagery links the hidden and the visible. The paradox that follows, "pain doesn't exist anymore / it's pure numbness," is chilling, because the "thudding in your head" and "pressure on your heart" are still there. The speaker has not stopped hurting. She has stopped being able to feel it as hurting.
The most important shift comes at the end, when "you" gives way to "i." For three stanzas the speaker keeps a distance by describing pain as something that happens to anyone. In the last lines she owns it: "why can't i fix the broken pieces of my body?" The unfinished question "when did the pain surpass" breaks off, as if she cannot complete the thought. The final line, "when did i left the ocean waves control my beach?", contains a grammatical slip. Whether intended or not, "left" echoes abandonment and makes the line read as a confession of having stepped aside. The beach image also fits the poem's logic. A shore cannot stop the tide, and it is slowly reshaped by it.
The poem is significant for its honesty. It offers no moral, no cure and no tidy ending, and it ends on a question. Many poems about pain describe the agony, but this one captures the more unsettling moment when the agony fades and the speaker is afraid of what has replaced it. For a young reader, that recognition may be the poem's lasting force: that numbness can pass for peace, and that noticing the difference is the first step toward asking for help.