Four short lines, and a whole relationship is put on trial in them. Lillith's «tides» opens with a gasp, "So surreal.", and then argues with it: "Was it ever real?" The speaker looks back at someone who once "fuled" their emotions and cannot decide whether what happened was overwhelming, imagined, or true but now out of reach. The closing simile gives the central idea. Being moved by another person is like the moon's hold on the sea, with the speaker as the water and the "you" as the distant body that decides when it rises and falls.
The first two lines reward slow reading. "Surreal" suggests something beyond the real, the word we reach for when an experience feels too intense or strange for ordinary life. The next line repeats the sound "real" and flips the meaning. First the experience was too much for reality, and then it may never have belonged to reality at all. That repetition is the nearest thing to rhyme in the poem, and it works like an echo, with the speaker hearing their own word come back doubtful. Nothing answers the question. The poem offers an image in place of an answer.
The layout adds to this. As the poem is set out here, each line steps further to the right before the last one swings back to the left margin. On the page that looks like a wave pushing out and then drawing back to shore. It also reads as hesitation, each line edging further from the first certainty. The lines swell as well, from about three syllables to five, then six or seven, then eight. The short, breathless fragment grows into a longer and steadier line, and the longest line arrives last, like a wave reaching its height. The final line has no full stop, so the tide is left still moving.
The sound of the third and fourth lines is quietly clever. "Emotions" and "ocean" end in nearly the same "-oshun" sound, so the sea is already hiding inside the word for feeling before the simile names it. The title "tides" also returns as the poem's last word, which closes a loop. Like water, the poem comes back to where it began.
The word "fuled" (for "fueled") sits oddly with that watery image. Fuel belongs to engines and fire, to something burned for energy, while the moon works through pull and gravity. The poem seems to mix two kinds of force. In the first, the other person supplies the energy. In the second, they control the movement. Whether or not the mix is deliberate, it suggests a speaker who felt both powered and steered. The misspelling is the one rough edge in an otherwise smooth poem, and it makes the line feel less polished and more like something said quickly, close to the feeling.
The moon is also an unusual choice of partner. It never touches the ocean and acts entirely from a distance, without needing to intend anything. That gives the simile an unspoken sadness. The speaker may have been moved without the other person ever knowing, which would explain the doubt in "Was it ever real?" An ocean cannot see the moon's side of things. The past tense "fuled" suggests the pull is over, and tides, after all, go out as well as in. These are readings rather than facts, but the imagery supports them.
The poem's significance is modest in scale but real. Moon and sea is an old pairing for love and longing, and a lazier poem would simply admire it. Lillith puts the image after a question, so it works less as decoration and more as the speaker's attempt to explain why their own memory is hard to trust. Everything else is left open: who "you" is, what happened, and why it ended. The text gives only the name Lillith and the title, and the poem needs nothing more. It captures a feeling most readers will recognise, that of being moved powerfully by someone and afterwards unsure what the movement meant.