Most wishes ask for something the wisher lacks. The wishes in Squire's poem are stranger, because the girl already has the freedom she longs for. She can travel, love and dress however she likes, and she knows it. The trouble is that knowing changes nothing, and the poem lives in the gap between permission and belief.
The construction makes this clear. The whole poem is one sentence, strung together with semicolons, and it opens and closes on "she wished". Three quatrains run in parallel, each starting "that knowing she could…", and each pairs a wide-open freedom with a hoped-for effect: travel will "transform her", love will let her heart "beat again", clothes will "enbolden her". The repetition sounds rehearsed, as if this is a list she has gone through many times. Then "but more than anything else" breaks the pattern. The final quatrain is the only one that doesn't begin with "that", and the only one that skips the promise-and-result structure. It simply states the wish.
The wishes also shrink in scale. Travel is about the whole world, love about a single heart, clothes about the surface of the body, and the last wish is about "herself". Each earlier wish starts to look like a detour around the final one. The language loosens along the way. "Anywhere at all" and "anyone at all" stretch possibility as far as it goes, but the third version, "however way she'd like", is looser and more spoken, and bends the grammar slightly, as speech does. The header calls the piece a "freewrite", which suggests quick, unpolished writing. That might explain the conversational phrasing and the slip "enbolden" for "embolden", though that is an inference from the label.
The most telling word is "could". In the first three stanzas it is a fact: she could travel, could love, could dress. In the last stanza the same word becomes the thing she doesn't have: "she wished she could / accept herself". The poem has turned "could" from an open door into a locked one. The other wishes depend on it too. She doesn't wish to travel, only that knowing she might would be enough to transform her. The wishes are really about wanting an inner permission slip.
Two small details suggest what is holding her back. Her heart is to beat "again", which implies it has been guarded, perhaps since an earlier hurt, though the poem never says so. And she wants to buy "all the things she looked stunning in". The past tense suggests she has already seen herself in these clothes and judged them stunning, yet she hasn't bought them. The obstacle isn't a lack of beauty or options but her refusal to believe she is entitled to either. Fear sits in the image of the heart as something that can break, and the poem's quiet question is how a person can have everything permitted and still feel stuck.
There is no rhyme, and the rhythm follows speech rather than a meter. Yet the line breaks do careful work. "She wished she could" hangs at the end of its line, suspended, before "accept herself" arrives. The final line, "as she was", is three one-syllable words with no full stop after them, so the sentence simply stops without closing. The earlier stanzas have longer, more elaborate lines, so the ending feels stripped back, like a admission after a lot of dressing up.
The sign-off, "//from a simple girl", looks like a code comment, which suggests a modern, online habit of writing. Judging by the text, it invites us to read "she" as the speaker's own self, seen from a little distance. "Simple" is a modest, self-diminishing word, and that fits the poem's theme: even the signature plays down its writer.
The poem is significant for its honesty about how self-belief works. It doesn't claim that travel, love or a new wardrobe would fix anything. It suggests that all three are stand-ins for something less visible and harder to ask for. By ranking self-acceptance above everything else, in the plainest words it can find, the poem says that no amount of outer freedom helps until the person inside agrees to use it.