A pair of tinted windows is meant to soften things, cutting the glare and making the view easier to bear. Take the tint away and nothing outside has changed, but everything looks harsher. That is the image at the centre of this poem, and it explains the whole ache of "Everything looks so different now." The speaker's friend, and the friend's messages, may be exactly as they always were. What has shifted is the filter, and the speaker is left to wonder why words that once passed as jokes now land as wounds.
The title, "I'm actually gay as hell," sits oddly above all this. It is loud, casual and internet-flavoured, and the poem never repeats it or explains it. Judging by the text alone, we can't know whether it is something the speaker feels unable to say, something the friend's jokes brush against, or simply a defiant mask over a tender poem. The gap is worth noticing. A confident, joking headline introduces a poem about no longer being able to laugh along.
The form is plain. There is no rhyme and no regular beat, just six quatrains of short, speech-like lines, with no question marks even though most of the lines are questions. "Am I the problem / Is it me" tumbles forward unpunctuated, as thoughts do at three in the morning. The questions also follow a strangely tidy logic: is it me, is it you, is it neither, is it both? The speaker works through every possible answer like someone solving a puzzle, as if the pain would ease if only the blame were assigned correctly. Even the wording gives way under the strain. "Who is it to be blamed" is slightly broken grammar, and the broken grammar feels truer than a polished line would.
The third stanza is where the speaker's own part comes through. Three verbs of generosity run together: "pampered," "allowed," "made." The friend appears as "You, who I allowed to do anything" and then, more coldly, as "The one I made into something so important." That is a revealing phrase. Importance here is something the speaker built and handed over, and it is also something that can hurt them. Meanwhile the vocabulary of romance, "compatible" and "meant for each other," is applied to what the later lines call a friend, which suggests how much weight this friendship carries.
The sixth stanza returns to the window image with a twist. "I know the window tinter will come back / And I'll see you just the same as before." The speaker doesn't hope to see more clearly. They hope the comfortable blur will return, and the fixing is imagined as something done by someone else, a tradesperson who simply arrives. Then comes "But right now / The pain is unbearable," where the short lines drop away from the earlier reasoning like a held breath finally released.
After that the poem stops looking like a poem. The last lines turn into near-prose: a long, rambling sentence about messages that are "not funny like it used to be," then the stark, isolated "It's just hurtful." The word "just" is doing a lot of work, shrinking the pain even as it admits it. The final voice is chattier still: "But that's just how they are y'know?" Here the speaker argues against their own feelings. "How dare I complain about something I'm used to" turns habit into a reason for silence, as though a hurt that has gone on long enough loses the right to be named. The poem ends on a question, "Why do I feel like this?", and offers no answer.
That unfinished ending is what gives the poem its worth. It has no villain and no dramatic betrayal, only a small, hard-to-name shift in what a friend's words do. Many readers will know the moment when a long-tolerated pattern stops being tolerable and the guilt about noticing arrives almost at once. By choosing plain speech, unpunctuated questions and one well-chosen image, the poem captures that moment without trying to tidy it up.