Nobody forgets as thoroughly as the speaker of «i forgot» claims to. The poem keeps announcing a blank, "i forgot the reasons", yet it is crowded with pictures, messages, books, songs and grass. The gap between what is declared lost and what is quietly still there is where the poem lives. It is about the aftermath of a love, not the ending itself. We never learn why it ended, and the speaker says they don't know either. What survives is the shape of the relationship without its explanation: the evidence is there, but the meaning is gone.
The opening shows how unsure the speaker is. Instead of stating that the love happened, they ask for confirmation: "i had pictures, didn't i? / i had messages, didn't i?" Later the same question is turned on the other person: "you gave me moments, didn't you?" Tag questions like these are what we say when we half-know something and want someone to back us up. The pictures and messages become exhibits in a case the speaker is trying to rebuild. The most striking line is "you gave me things to forget, didn't you?", which makes the lover's gifts sound like they came with their own erasure built in. It could be bitter or merely sad, and the poem doesn't say. That restraint is part of its honesty.
There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation. The lowercase lines read like something typed into a phone late at night. That is an impression rather than a fact, but it suits a poem so full of "messages." Repetition does the work rhyme might have done. "i forgot the reasons" returns four times, like someone pressing a bruise to see if it still hurts. The word "once" works the same way: "i loved you once," "you loved me once." Both loves are tucked safely into the past.
The longest stretch is a run of lines that all begin "what those": what the pictures meant, what the messages read, what the stories told. Watch how the list changes as it goes. It starts with concrete objects and slides into vagueness: "what those forgotten things were / what those things held a place in." That last line ends on a dangling "in," so the grammar gives out just as memory does. Then comes "what those motions moved," where the noun and verb share a root and the phrase circles back on itself with nothing inside. Throughout, the objects act like people: messages "read," stories "told," poems "sang." The keepsakes still seem to speak, but in a language the speaker can no longer decode. They have the letters but not the alphabet.
Then the poem turns: "and i hope you forgot mine." The hopes that follow are surprisingly detailed: "those books i made you read / those songs i made you scream out / those nights on fields of grass." A speaker who has supposedly lost everything can still recall the reading list, the shouted lyrics and the grass. "made you" suggests an eager, insistent kind of closeness. The poem contradicts itself here, and I think deliberately. What has gone is the why, not the what. Perhaps the speaker hopes the other has forgotten out of embarrassment, or kindness, or a wish to be spared.
The last lines draw the distinction clearly. The speaker hopes the other forgot "that i loved you once," but "didn't forget me / just as i remember you." It is a curious wish: to be erased as a lover but kept as a person. The phrase "just as" also admits that the speaker hasn't forgotten the other at all. So the title is only half true. The reasons are lost, but the person remains.
What makes the poem worth reading is how plainly it handles a familiar feeling: the explanations for a love can fade while its traces refuse to. It never decides whether forgetting would be a relief or a loss. It leaves the final wish, to be remembered, to carry the emotion, and that unresolved wish is what stays with the reader.