Two people, a shared past, and a love that took its time: that is the whole story of "MADI", told in barely a dozen sentences. The speaker looks back on a relationship in which both people felt enormous to each other while the world around them felt tiny. The central idea is that closeness cannot be hurried. Affection was hard to give, the connection formed slowly and invisibly, and the only honest response was to wait.
The poem begins before its first line. The title is spelled out with gaps, M A D I, so that a reader has to say it slowly, almost letter by letter, the way someone might write a name they care about. Beneath it comes «Tol,» in guillemets, with a comma after it like the greeting of a letter. The poem never explains these two names, but the layout suggests an address from one person to another, and the "you" of the poem seems to be that person. That framing makes the poem feel private, as if we are reading something not quite meant for us.
The first stanza sets up a paradox: "We were giants / In this smol world." The spelling "smol" is the language of internet affection, used for things that are small and cute and worth protecting. Putting it next to "giants" turns the world into a kind of dollhouse. The couple are not powerful, but they loom large to each other, which is all that matters. The next lines make the idea more precise: "Although i was smol to you / You were big to me." The sentence moves across the line break from "you" to "You," so the second person is handed to the reader almost like a baton. The lowercase "i" against the capital "You" is a small visual joke that is also a statement of humility. The speaker shrinks on the page while the beloved grows.
The second stanza is the most ambiguous. "Giving me affection / Was difficult / But it never stopped you." It is not entirely clear why affection was difficult. The reason might be shyness, distance, or circumstances, and the poem declines to say. The ambiguity helps, because the reader fills the gap with their own experience. What matters is the pairing of "difficult" and "never stopped you," which turns the other person's persistence into the poem's quiet form of heroism.
Structurally the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short, mostly a handful of syllables, and they sound like speech rather than song. That plainness suits the subject, since a love that grows slowly would sound false in elaborate language. The rhythm does its real work in the third stanza. The long sentence, "It took a while for those / Invisible strings to form / Around our hearts / And eventually / Bring us together," is broken into fragments, and "And eventually" gets a whole line to itself. The reader waits a beat there, exactly as the speaker waited. The form enacts the delay it describes.
The central image is the "invisible strings." They recall the familiar idea of a thread that links two people destined to meet, but the poem gives it a bodily detail: the strings form "around our hearts," as if tying and pulling were happening gradually and unseen. Nobody pulls them tight. They simply form, which suggests that the bond grew by itself while the two people were busy being shy or unsure.
Then comes the shortest line in the poem, set apart as its own stanza: "So we waited." The word "So" makes waiting a conclusion, not a defeat. After all the buildup, the poem ends on the plainest verb it could have chosen, in the past tense, which leaves the reader wondering whether the waiting was rewarded. The previous stanza says the strings did "bring us together," so the closing line reads less like a cliffhanger than like a quiet summary of how it happened.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It mixes a playful, very modern word with an old and serious idea about fate and patience, and it trusts a few small images to carry a large feeling. It also reverses a common assumption, that love is a matter of grand gestures. Here the grand thing is the smallest: someone who keeps trying, and someone who is willing to wait.