"Oh I missed the old you" is the kind of thing parents say fondly, probably without hearing how it lands. KGBlack's "Growing up" hears it clearly. The speaker takes the remark at face value, as a eulogy delivered to the person it describes, and the poem's response is to hold a proper funeral. Its central idea is that growing up is a real loss, and that grief for the child you were deserves a ritual instead of a shrug. The poem also insists that the mourning should end in a greeting.
The opening stanzas set the tone. "How they so casually mourn your death / In front of you" is the sharpest moment in the poem, and the line break helps. "In front of you" stands alone, as if the speaker is left exposed. After that the poem turns practical. "Let's" begins instruction after instruction (make a box, fill it, dig a hole), and the repetition gives the poem the shape of a recipe or a ceremony. Grief becomes something you can do with your hands.
The funeral is odd, though. The coffin is a "bright pink" box, the mourners "blast" their favourite songs, and sweets are sprinkled on the grave. Childhood colours and sugar sit next to "dead dreams," "betrayal and heartbreak," and a vial of tears "more bitter and salty" than the ones cried when "we were kids." That clash is the poem's emotional engine. It will not let the loss be purely sad or purely playful, which is probably how growing up feels from the inside.
The objects chosen for burial are the most telling. The best are "stickers we never used and markers that never got the chance to run dry." They are small, unfinished things, and they stand for a childhood that did not run its full course. The speaker also asks "you" to wear "the clothes that don't fit you" and to have your hair "the way you used to." It is a last dress rehearsal of the old self, and the ill-fitting clothes quietly admit that going back is no longer possible. The phrase "all the things that changed us / All the things that killed us" makes the poem's equation explicit: change and death are treated as the same event.
The form is loose and conversational. There is no regular rhyme or metre, and the lines are short and speech-like, closer to a confession than a crafted song. That fits a voice that sounds young and unpolished, and it keeps the poem from sounding like a lecture on maturity. The pronouns shift as the poem goes on. It begins with "you," the person being talked about, moves to "we" in the shared invitation of "let's," and arrives at "Goodbye me," where the mourner and the mourned are the same person. The speaker is both the grave-digger and the one being buried.
The final stanzas shift gently. "Though you were fun to be with, / The world thought otherwise" is the bluntest line, suggesting that the child's way of being did not survive contact with everyone else's expectations. Then comes a small act of generosity: the old self will stay "alive in thier eyes," so the parents' missing is reframed as a kind of love. The poem could have ended in resentment but doesn't. The last words are hesitant and almost shy: "I know it's hard, / Try to say hello." The speaker is coaxing themselves as much as the reader. The closing "Hello, / To the new me" is quiet after all the noise of the burial.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it takes a stock phrase from family life and makes it a story with a beginning, a ritual and a way forward. It does not pretend that growing up is simply a gain, and it does not stay stuck in nostalgia either. It lets the reader say goodbye properly first, so the hello can feel earned.