Most writing about harm tries to hold onto the moment it happened. Kiwibirdkiwi242's poem starts from the opposite problem: the harm is slipping away. All we have of the writer is an online username, so everything here rests on the words themselves. The speaker describes forgetting as a slow, orderly exit. "The pain leaves first," then the fear, then the emotions, and finally "even the memory itself." The central idea is that forgetting does not undo what happened. It only removes the proof, and the speaker has to find other evidence.
The opening section reads almost like a list of things going out the door. "Leaving nothing but an impression" is a quiet double meaning: an impression is a vague feeling, but it is also a mark pressed into something soft, like a bruise. The parenthesis in "(un)lucky" shows how torn the speaker is. Losing the pain would be a mercy, yet it also means losing the truth. That is why the line "Maybe a year if I grasp with all my heart and soul" is so poignant. Here, remembering is something the speaker has to fight for.
The poem's cleverest move is to turn the speaker into a detective of their own life. They cannot recall the events, but they can read the aftermath: "A million habits / Born of pain and fear and saddeness." The logic is almost legal: "habits like these aren't born of one time occurrences." The evidence is domestic and small: "Hangers on the floor broken," a toy "hidden away," "Clothes that hide my frame." The line "My tears are silent for a reason" is the most chilling, because the reason is the one thing the speaker cannot supply. Even the one remembered hit has been hollowed out, "Just the before after and the tears that followed." The missing commas in that line leave a gap where the event should be.
That lack of punctuation runs through the whole poem. The lines are short and plain, with no rhyme and almost no marks, so the poem feels breathless, like a confession made in one go. Repetition does the work that rhyme would otherwise do. "How many times / How many times was I hurt" circles like a mind that cannot settle. Later the poem repeats "In the car," "On the train," and "In Lowes of all places." Naming ordinary places makes the cruelty ordinary too. "Of all places" adds a flicker of bitter humour, since a hardware store seems so unlikely a setting for a panic attack. The shift from "you" to "You all told me to stop" suggests the dismissal came from more than one person: "irrational," "no reason to be so upset." The speaker's reply is gentle and devastating: "I know they seemed silly / But they were still scary to me. / They still are."
The line "I was only a child / I still am a child" collapses past and present, and it explains the poem's turn outward. The speaker watches the same treatment fall on a brother, and memory flips from weakness to strength. Earlier the speaker "can't remember what you did to me," but now "I can see every time you touch him." The poem is unclear about whether "my sibling," who "got out" and "has a house," is the same person as the brother who remains. That vagueness makes the brother's situation feel more urgent. The speaker's hope for him, "nothing more than he can handle," is modest, almost heartbreaking.
The final line is the only full stop in the poem: "And I will not forget." After all the open-ended lines, the closing period works like a door shutting. It turns the speaker's fading memory into a vow, so that witnessing becomes a form of resistance.
The poem matters because it shows something that is often missed about trauma: it can survive in a person's habits long after the memories are gone. It also shows a young person trying to protect someone smaller using the only tools they have, which are attention and refusal.