A save point promises mercy. If a run goes badly, you reload and try again. That is the logic behind the title of mayothegalileo's poem, «load new save point?», and the poem is the speaker's answer to the question, though it arrives sideways, through a long and surprisingly tender "but."
The poem starts with a wish that nearly everyone has had: "i often wonder if i could do it all again." The next line, "all of it," sits alone, and the pause gives it weight. The speaker isn't thinking of one mistake but of the whole run. What follows is a list of regrets that grows steadily more serious. First come words: "things i've said at the wrong time to the wrong person." Then thoughts: "things i've thought at the right time in the wrong place." The balance of wrong, right and wrong again makes the speaker sound like someone whose timing is always slightly off. The list then moves from behaviour to belonging ("who i belonged to"), to longing ("who i wish i was"), and finally to identity itself: "what i have become." The repeated verb "change" drives all of this, though in the fourth line it slips into the past tense, "changed." Whether that is deliberate or not, it fits a mind drifting between what could be altered and what is already done.
Then comes the turn: "but if i change it then i wouldn't have watched or read or listened to something for the first time." The poem's second movement runs on another repetition, "i wouldn't have," and the regrets give way to small, vivid memories. The speaker screamed at a phone at fourteen after the first and last episode of a show, and cried under the covers at sixteen to a song. These details are specific and a little embarrassing, which makes them believable. What the speaker would lose is not a grand achievement but the private experience of being moved. The phrase "something so detached from my reality" is the poem's quiet paradox. A show or a song is by definition outside your life, yet the speaker says it produced real feeling. The line "i wouldn't have connected those dots" suggests that these experiences also helped the speaker make sense of things.
The ages are worth noticing. Fourteen, sixteen, eighteen: the poem moves in two-year steps and ends in the present. The third entry, "i wouldn't have done anything i've done at eighteen," is the only one without a specific memory. It is the vaguest line in the poem, and perhaps the most honest. The speaker can't yet say what this stage of life means, only that it counts.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation apart from apostrophes. The lowercase "i" and the lack of full stops make it read like a thought spoken aloud and not yet tidied up. The lines vary in length, from the clipped "all of it" to the long sentence about the show, so the rhythm keeps shifting between a shrug and a rush of feeling. The absence of rhyme keeps the tone plain, which suits a poem whose argument is that ordinary things matter.
The ending refuses a neat resolution: "i wouldn't be whole / despite how often i feel empty." The word "despite" carries the poem. The speaker doesn't claim the emptiness is gone. They claim that wholeness and emptiness can be true at once, and that wholeness is a fact about what has happened to you, while emptiness is a fact about how you feel today.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. Many poems about regret end by either wallowing or consoling. This one does something more careful. It treats the self as the sum of every unplanned encounter, including the embarrassing ones, and concludes that a reset would cost more than it gave back. It leaves the title's question unanswered on the page, but the "but" in the middle of the poem has already answered it.