The speaker addresses a little girl who visits them every night, and halfway through we learn who she is: "me." She is the speaker's younger self, and the poem is a painful conversation across time. The speaker keeps asking why they go on fighting when they feel they can't change or help themselves, which suggests a deep, tired struggle with the past.
The poem also hints at a broken promise, a secret ("Promise me you'll never tell"), and an adolescence whose "innocence" is put in quotation marks, as if the word no longer fits. The judgment is left unspoken, but the doubt is clear. The speaker admits to not loving this girl, or who she became, while her reply, "I love you too," stays tender and unguarded. That gap between rejection and forgiveness drives the poem's ache.
The mood is haunted, weary, and sorrowful. The repeated lines and the sarcastic "blessed" air at the end give it a circling feeling, as though the speaker can't escape this nightly meeting.