Olivia Taylor's "Lost Things" is about the aftermath of a relationship that has fallen apart, and the speaker's struggle to accept their share of the blame. The poem opens with a sense of waste: everything the two people had together is gone "by a single night." The speaker doesn't point a finger at one person. "We both messed up," they say, and the old saying "we made our bed / Now we lay in it" turns that shared fault into a kind of sentence they must both serve.
The mood is regretful and raw. The speaker lists what has been lost, "all the roads that we crossed," which suggests a shared history now turned painful, and then says plainly that everything "feel[s] like hell since you've been gone." The short, simple lines read almost like someone talking to themselves. The ending, "What can I say? / I never would've guessed it," leaves us with shock and a lack of answers. The speaker seems stunned by how quickly things changed, and unable to explain it.