Most breakup poems either rage or mourn. "6 (thinkin' bout' you)" does something more awkward and more honest: it keeps changing its mind. The speaker opens by wishing her ex well ("I hope you're doing alright"), admits two lines later that she is no longer happy, and ends by confessing, "nah, I'm not over you." The poem is about how kindness and hurt can sit in the same sentence, and how looking back on a relationship means rereading it with what you know now.
The speaker tells the story in loose free verse, with no regular rhyme or meter. Its title and spellings ("thinkin' bout'") make it sound like a voice note or a late-night text, and the line lengths follow her mood. When she recalls the first meeting, the lines sprawl into long, gossipy run-ons: "I've heard rumors about that kid, he's cute but I should stay away." When the pain gets close, they shrink: "it was over / you left me on the side of the road / crying." The line "I'm not happy anymore" stands alone, with no explanation, and the gap around it does the work a rhyme would do in a more formal poem.
The poem's best invention is the image of the ribs. At seven, the speaker fell from a tree and "broke my heart" (a child's confusion of body and feeling). Her mother wipes away her tears and says that ribs are "there to protect your heart." The advice is warm and practical, and the poem later turns it against itself: "turns out your ribs break pretty easily / the moment you meet a beautiful boy." The childhood fall becomes a rehearsal for the adult one. Falling is the poem's controlling motif. She falls out of a tree, then "into the trap of your gleaming smile," then "into that trap too" when the "good morning gorgeous" texts arrive. By the end she hopes the new girl "doesn't fall into the trap of your / beautiful brown eyes." The repeated word turns an accident into a pattern, and the traps are made of attractive things: a smile, a compliment, a pair of eyes.
The setting adds to this. The couple meet in the nurse's office, both with sinus infections, "miserable." It is a place meant for healing, and it is where the damage begins. The comic detail of exchanging numbers "in front of the nurse" shows how little ceremony the start had, and the speaker's "ahh, I was so happy" has a sting because we already know the cost.
The poem is also hard on its speaker. She was warned by the rumors and admits "yeah, I'm ashamed" about being won over by a cliché. Her ex's language is similarly telling. He avoids "always, forever" and says only "a long time," a phrase that sounds like a promise but isn't one. The pronouns shift as well: for a stretch he is "he" ("the lies he told me"), then "you" again. That slide suggests she is drifting between telling the story to us and still talking to him in her head.
The ending turns on counting. The relationship is dated as "1 year, 5 months ago," and the new girlfriend is "3 months strong," in quotation marks that make the phrase sound both borrowed and slightly mocking. The final "I just hope" echoes the opening hope, but now it is doing something else. It could be a real warning, or jealousy dressed as concern, or both. The poem doesn't settle this, which is why it feels true.
The numeral in the title suggests part of a numbered sequence, but the poem doesn't say so, and I can't tell from the text alone what it counts. What the text does show is a young speaker working out her feelings in plain language, and doing it with some craft. Its significance lies in its unguarded voice. It uses a mother's comforting line, a hospital-like room and a repeated "trap" to show that recovering from a first serious heartbreak is slower, and less dignified, than the advice we are given as children suggests.