The speaker of "10/6/2020- Restart" wants to run away, but not from a place. What they want to escape is "the person I used to be and the life she led." The pronoun is revealing: the old self has already become a "she," a stranger spoken about at arm's length. The poem's central idea is that reinvention is not a single clean reset. Changing your name and hair is the easy part, and the harder work of becoming yourself goes on quietly and may never end. The title, a date followed by a single word, reads like a label on a file or a journal page, as if "Restart" were a button that could be pressed once and be done with.
The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady meter, and it sounds like someone thinking aloud. The opening shows how well the form fits. A neat list of changes ("I chopped off all my hair, / Changed my name, / Changed my wardrobe") builds momentum, then a "But" stops it. What can't be altered is "the towns she came from and the parents she was raised by," and the passive phrasing makes the speaker's lack of control over their origins audible.
The middle of the poem is a catalogue of fantasies, each opening with "I could." The repetition gives it the breathless feel of a daydream, and the details are vivid and funny. There is the "weird bassist with big hair and a threatening stage name," the van with "little charms and witchy things hanging from the rear view mirror," and the music store where the speaker would "stand on the tables and dramatically play violin for the regulars." The casual verb in "uhaul it into her house" has the same offhand humor. Yet nearly every escape comes with a costume, a new name or a new persona, so the fantasies are really more reinventions. The sole realistic option, "scholarships," is dismissed with a joke, "But where's the fun in that?" The line is light, but the word "normal" before it carries some weariness.
The poem turns on a quiet pair of lines: "I don't dislike my past. / It's just I've never felt like me." After the grand daydreams, the evidence of the real self turns out to be small. The speaker lied that pink was their favorite color, painted a bedroom pink, felt guilty, and repainted it "gray and blue, which are colors I actually like." This is more convincing than any van or band. Color keeps returning. The old name was "a pink name with too many syllables," because the speaker has synesthesia, so even a name has a color, and pink stands for the false self. The "drugstore concealer" works the same way, since both it and the pink paint are ways of covering something up.
The style changes again near the end. The sentences shrink to clinical fragments: "I dissociate a lot. / I depersonalize. / I'm not who I was." The short lines are flat and unadorned, as if the speaker were stating facts rather than performing. The most painful admission is about photographs: "I didn't want someone I hated to be documented as me." Photographs prove who you were, and the speaker refused to let that proof exist. This also echoes the earlier detail of the antique-store owner "who collects old photos and hats," a small image of someone who preserves the past.
The ending refuses comfort. "I restarted, but I don't think I'll ever be done restarting." The final sentence admits that the speaker is "always... chasing some new fantasy and living in my head," which suggests that the whole list of "I could" scenarios may be the habit the speaker is describing, not only a way out of it.
What makes the poem worth reading is this honesty. It does not offer a triumphant makeover story. It lets humor and distress share the same lines, and it treats identity, including the speaker's present questioning of their gender, as something still in progress. Its plain, confessional voice makes that uncertainty feel familiar rather than dramatic.