Logan Brosemer opens "Missing you" by borrowing the most famous question in English drama. "To miss someone / Or not miss them, / That is the question" echoes Hamlet's "To be or not to be", but the speaker has no real choice to weigh. The next stanza settles it: "No matter how hard I try / I end up missing you." The poem is not a debate. It is an admission that the speaker has already lost the argument with their own feelings, and everything after it is the evidence.
That evidence arrives through repetition. Nearly every line from the third stanza on begins "I miss", a technique called anaphora, and it works like a tally. The speaker does not say "I miss everything about you". They itemise: the laugh, the way you "lounge around", the sparkle in your eyes "when you play with your cats", the "passion you have for your art". These are concrete, domestic details, the kind only someone who has paid close attention would remember. A grander poem might have said "you were my world". This one remembers the cats.
The beloved is not flattened into a perfect figure, either. Among the praise sits "your sarcasm" and "your constant pushing for people to be better", which sounds like a real person, sometimes sharp and sometimes demanding. The invented word "adorkableness", a blend of "adorable" and "dork", has the same effect. It is playful and a little clumsy, and it suggests the speaker is quoting a private joke, a word that probably belonged to the two of them. Even the small slip in "I miss you smile" (where "your" seems intended) adds to the feeling of something written quickly and sincerely rather than polished.
Two words quietly knit the poem together. "Wonder" appears three times: the beloved creates "new wonders", seeks "wonder in this world", and is "wonderful". "World" returns in a surprising way. The beloved finds wonder in the world, yet their hugs "make the world melt away". The speaker is describing someone who sharpens the world and also shelters them from it. That explains why "the safety I feel when with you" is one of the poem's quietest and most important lines. What is missed is not just a person but a place to be unguarded.
The form shifts with the content. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The language is close to speech, in short lines and plain words. Stanzas stretch and contract unevenly, and the longest one, about sleeping beside someone and "hours on end of conversation late at night", runs on as if the talk itself were running on. Then comes the stark pairing "The good / And the bad", broken across two lines, as though the speaker pauses to acknowledge that confiding in someone means trusting them with both.
The tense creates the poem's real ache. "I miss our adventures, / The thoughts of the life we wanted" uses the past tense, "wanted", so the future the couple imagined has been lost along with the person. The poem never says why. Judging by the text alone, we cannot tell whether the relationship ended, or whether distance or something else separates them. That silence keeps the focus on the feeling rather than the story, and it lets readers bring their own loss to the gap.
The ending shows this best. "To the moon and back...." trails into an ellipsis and then into the poem's final words, "I miss you...", which repeat the title and fade rather than resolve. After all the careful listing, the speaker runs out of details and is left with the plain sentence underneath them all.
The poem's significance lies in this honesty. It does not try to turn heartbreak into philosophy, and it quickly drops its Hamlet-style framing for something more truthful. Its message is that missing someone is made of small, particular things: a laugh, a late-night conversation, a person's joy in their cats. By naming them one by one, the poem shows how much a single absence can contain.