Three lines, three emotions, and one word that keeps coming back: alone. Maria's untitled poem, marked only with three asterisks, is small enough to read in ten seconds, but it holds a surprisingly complicated emotional state. Someone has left, and the speaker tells us what she did not feel (regret), what she did feel (pain), and what she suspects lay underneath (happiness).
The first line is the oddest, and it sets the tone. "Regret was I never thought of even when you left me alone" is slightly twisted in its grammar. Read quickly, "Regret was" sounds like a statement, as if regret itself were being announced. Then the sentence turns and we realise regret is something the speaker never considered. That little stumble helps the line, because regret is put first and then denied. The word "even" matters too. It implies that leaving is exactly the moment when regret would be expected, perhaps regret over words said or chances missed, and the speaker says it did not come. Whether she means this proudly, numbly or defensively, the poem leaves open.
The second line is the plainest and the shortest: "Pain was all I felt when I was alone." It is the emotional centre, and its bareness fits. There is no simile, no softening, just a flat equation of pain with everything she felt. Notice, too, what happens to "alone." In line one she is "left … alone," which is something done to her by "you." In line two she simply "was alone," a condition she now occupies. The person addressed has quietly disappeared from the poem. "You" appears once and never returns, which makes the absence something the reader feels in the structure as well as hearing about it.
Then comes the turn. "Happiness was there but only hiding behind the pain." This is the longest line, and the only one with a real image. Happiness is personified as something that hides, and pain becomes a kind of screen or wall in front of it. The picture is spatial and rather childlike, like someone crouched behind furniture, which gives the line a faint tenderness. The small words do a lot of work: "but only" sounds cautious, almost apologetic, as if she does not want to claim too much. She does not say happiness arrived or won. It was "there," present but out of sight. Because everything is in the past tense, we also sense that she may be looking back, and that the hidden happiness is something she recognises only in hindsight.
The poem's sound shapes this movement. There is no regular metre and no punctuation at all, so each line runs on one breath, like a thought spoken without stopping to edit. The lines swell and shrink: a long first line, a short second, a long third. The rhyme is unusual. "Alone" ends both of the first two lines, an identical echo rather than a true rhyme, as though the word cannot be escaped. The third line breaks the pattern and ends instead on "pain," a word we have already heard in line two. That decision is telling. Even in the sentence that promises happiness, the last word the reader carries away is pain. The structure reproduces the idea: happiness is mentioned, but pain still has the final position.
The three lines also begin in the same way, with an abstract noun followed by "was": "Regret was," "Pain was," "Happiness was." The repetition gives them the feel of a ledger, each emotion checked off in turn, and it makes the third entry more surprising, since it sits in the same grammatical slot as the others but means something quite different.
Where the poem is most interesting is in its refusal of the neat version of heartbreak. It does not say that grief destroyed her, or that she was secretly relieved. It says pain and happiness were both present, one covering the other. Ordinary experience often looks like this, and few short poems admit it so directly. We do not learn who left, why, or whether the loss was a break-up or something else. By withholding those details, Maria keeps attention on the emotional layering itself, and that is why such a small piece lingers. It leaves one question open: will the happiness come out from behind the pain, or has it only been given a place to hide?