Naps are evil at one age and irresistible at the next, and Gigi builds a whole poem out of reversals like that one. The speaker lists what childhood was like, turns on "but now," and then walks back through the same list almost line for line to see what has become of each item. Days that were "longer" are now "so short it seems unbearable." Friendships that were "stronger" are "lies." The mirroring is so tidy that the reader does the comparing without being asked, and much of the pleasure is watching each pair click into place.
The best pair is "parents were giants" and "parents seem to be no longer giants but trolls." Both words come from fairy tales, so the speaker hasn't left the world of stories. The story has just turned darker. Size is still the point, since adults still loom, but awe has curdled into suspicion. The same swing shows in how the two halves treat imagination. Childhood gets the grand claim that it was "better than anything in the universe," a line that runs long and a little breathless, as a child's boasts do. The grown-up version is flat and short: "i rarely use imagination any longer."
One line in the first half gets no reply. "The world was a playground" has no counterpart after "but now," and the second list simply steps over it. Whether or not this was planned, the effect is quiet and sharp. The poem never says the world stopped being a playground. It just leaves that space empty.
The form fits this plainness. There is no rhyme scheme and no regular meter, only short, clipped lines, most ending in a comma, so the poem sounds like someone talking in one long breath. The lowercase "i" gives it the feel of a diary page. There is a joke here too: "teachers taught riming" in the first half, and "teachers no longer teach riming" in the second, and the poem itself has dropped rhyme, as if it had outgrown it along with the classroom. The ending slows the rhythm. "And still, / even now," arrives in two hesitant fragments, like a pause before admitting something.
Not everything flips, and the exceptions are the most revealing lines. "I still laugh at immature things" is a small, cheerful continuity. "I still lie" is more interesting. The child called lying "my own version of story telling," a flattering name that turned fibs into art. The teenager drops the costume and says only "i still lie." The habit survived, but the imagination that excused it has faded. Reading is the one clear gain, from "a chore" to "an escape." Judging by the poem's pattern, that makes sense. A speaker who rarely plays games and finds friendships hollow might well reach for books as a way out of the real world, now that it is no longer a playground.
The humour matters because it makes the sadness believable. "Boys had cooties" and "boys no longer have cooties" works as a joke, and it also hints at a change the speaker doesn't spell out. "Teens were moody" becomes "i am the moody teen," and that small "the" is telling. The child who once labelled a whole category of people has become a member of it.
What makes the poem worth reading is its last move. A nostalgia poem would end by mourning a perfect childhood, but this speaker admits that even then "no one understood me." That sentence appears in both halves, almost word for word, and it is the one line that doesn't change, apart from the tense. Growing up here is not a fall from paradise. It is an exchange of problems, with one ache running through both. By giving a child and a teenager the same loneliness, the poem suggests that being misunderstood is not a symptom of age at all, and that may be why a poem this simple lands so honestly.