A wish that can't be granted sits at the centre of "if i could". The speaker would like to turn back a few months and never begin: never get close to the person addressed, never get to know them. But the poem is less about a mistake than about the helplessness of having already fallen. Wanting to undo the past becomes a way of saying how much it hurts now. The central idea is a painful paradox: the harder you wish you had never loved someone who doesn't seem to love you back, the more clearly you show that you can't un-feel it.
The form is plain. It is free verse with no rhyme, and the stanzas are uneven, running six lines, four, six, then a short closing three. Almost everything is lowercase and unpunctuated, so the lines read like thoughts typed out before anyone has tidied them. The apostrophes come and go: "wont" and "dont" lose theirs, while "can't" and "you've" keep them. Without rhyme or a steady beat, the poem relies on repetition, and it uses it deliberately. "i wont try to get close to you / i wont try to get to know you" is a pair of near-identical lines that sound like a vow. Later, "you dont seem to care" and "you dont seem to feel what i feel" repeat the pattern as a complaint. The first repeated structure is about what the speaker would do differently. The second is about what the other person fails to do.
The grammar is worth a closer look. After "if i could", English would normally expect "i wouldn't be doing this". Instead the speaker writes "i wont be doing this", which turns a hypothetical into a flat resolution. Read generously, it sounds as if the speaker is trying to convince themselves, as though the wish were still a decision they could make. Other phrasings, such as "this past few months" and "its hurt", bend standard English too. They give the poem a spoken, unguarded quality, and the feeling comes across before any polish does.
The only real image is "falling". Compare it with the verbs of the first stanza: "get close" and "get to know" are things a person chooses to do, and the word "try" stresses that effort. "Falling more into you" is the opposite, since nobody falls on purpose. The poem quietly argues that small deliberate steps led somewhere the speaker never chose. The word "more" matters too, because it suggests the fall has no bottom. Notice also the move from "couldnt stop" to "can't stand": the past slides into the present, and the story becomes an ache happening now.
The most interesting line is "i was blurred by my own feeling". Up to this point the speaker has been accusing: you don't care, you don't understand. Here they admit their view may be distorted. This explains why the poem keeps saying "seem" and never "are". The speaker doesn't actually know what the other person feels, only how things look from inside a strong emotion. The final stanza returns to the word: "you seem / pretty fine". That is the real sting. The person is calm and "looking good as you've already been", and the word "already" suggests they are unchanged, while the speaker has been altered. It is also the only line with a full stop. After a poem of open-ended, unpunctuated lines, the period sounds like resignation, a door closing on a feeling that has nowhere to go.
What makes the poem significant is its honesty and restraint. It has no grand metaphors and no villain. The speaker never says the other person did anything wrong, only that they don't seem to feel the same, and that mix of hurt and fairness makes the voice believable. Many readers will recognise the situation of liking someone more than they like you back, and of wishing you could take your own feelings out of the picture. The poem shows that a handful of simple words, a repeated structure and one image of falling can carry an emotion without any decoration. The title's "if i could" is never answered, and that unanswered wish is where the poem leaves us.