Fear usually needs something to cling to: a person, a place, a possession that could be taken away. Maria's single line gives it nothing. "The fear of losing apart of you that was never there" names a dread whose object has never existed, and the whole poem lives in that contradiction. It is about the particular ache of wanting more from someone than they ever offered, and of grieving in advance for an intimacy that stayed imaginary. The central idea is that we can mourn what we only hoped for as sharply as what we actually had.
The line is built as a fragment. It has no main verb. It is a noun phrase, "the fear of losing...", followed by a clause hanging off its end. Nothing happens in it. It names a feeling and leaves it standing, which suits a feeling with no event behind it. The lowercase opening and the lack of a title (the asterisks in the heading are the usual mark of an untitled piece) make it read like the middle of a thought, something that was already running before we arrived. Only a final full stop closes it, and it lands with some finality.
There is no rhyme, but the line has a pull of its own. Counted loosely, it runs to fourteen syllables with a stress pattern that rocks along, "the FEAR of LOS-ing a PART of YOU", before slowing at the end. "That was never there" can be read with almost equal weight on each word, so the line drags to a halt where the emptiness is. Fear also sits at the start and "there" at the end, two words with a faint shared sound, as if the line were bracketed by feeling at one edge and absence at the other.
Imagery is nearly absent, and that is part of the effect. We get no hands, rooms or weather. The closest thing to a picture is spatial: "part" suggests a piece broken off a whole, and "there" suggests a place where someone should have been standing. Absence becomes a location, a spot we keep glancing at and finding vacant.
The grammar is where the line gets most interesting. "Fear of losing" belongs to the present, an anxiety still going on, while "was never there" is firmly past and final. The speaker is afraid of a future loss that the past has already ruled out. Logically, you cannot lose what you never had, and the poem seems to know it. Yet the fear survives the logic, which is perhaps the point: feelings do not check their own paperwork.
Then there is "you". The poem does not say who is addressed. It could be a lover who held something back, or a friend whose warmth turned out to be partial. It might even be the speaker's own self, a version of her that she expected to become and did not. The poem gives no way to decide, and the ambiguity lets each reader supply their own missing "part".
One detail deserves a careful comment. As printed, the line reads "apart of you", where standard usage would give "a part of you". It may be a slip, or it may be deliberate; the text alone cannot tell us. Either way, the word produces a second meaning. "Apart" means separated, so the line quietly carries the idea of being kept apart from the person it addresses. The fear of losing "a part" and the condition of being "apart" blur together, and the distance the speaker dreads is already there in the spelling. A reading that keeps both versions in play is richer than one that corrects the line and moves on.
What makes the poem worth attention is how much it does with so little. Its brevity enacts its subject: a line this short is mostly white space, and the space around it works like the missing part it describes. It also puts a name to an experience many readers will recognise but rarely manage to say aloud, the grief that has no funeral because nothing officially died. Relationships, expectations and even our picture of ourselves can all have a version that was only ever promised, never delivered. By compressing that into one sentence that contradicts itself, Maria suggests that the contradiction is not a flaw in the feeling but the feeling itself.