The speaker is caught in a strange, hollow moment where emptiness and fullness seem to be the same thing. Sitting in darkness, aware only of their own breath, they feel cut off from everything yet strangely tied to it, "detached yet wholly mine." The poem doesn't settle on one feeling. Nothing becomes everything, and everywhere shrinks into "this small space of me," so the speaker's world feels both huge and tiny at once.
The repeated "i was" lines work like a chant, setting opposites side by side: nothing and everything, detached and everywhere. Short lines and sudden breaks slow the reading down, almost like breathing. The ending is the most striking part. The speaker moves from hearing an echo to becoming one: "it echoed / it echoed / i echoed." The mood is quiet, dizzy, and a little eerie, a loneliness that also feels like an odd kind of awareness of being alive.