Fairy tales are built to travel: they start at "once upon a time" and arrive, eventually, at "happily ever after." Sam M's poem borrows both ends of that journey and leaves out the middle, which is exactly where the speaker is stranded. The subject is the distance between an earlier self who was open and at ease and a present self who performs cheerfulness for other people. The central idea is that what has been lost is not happiness alone but honesty, the chance to be seen as you really are.
The form is plain on purpose. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short, close to spoken phrases, and apart from the final full stop there is no punctuation at all, so the poem runs on like someone talking quietly once they have finally started. Repetition holds it together. "Once upon a time" returns four times, like a drumbeat, and each return is followed by something gone: being known, not needing anyone else to supply happiness, liking yourself, laughing without faking it. Single words recur too. "Happy" appears three times and shifts meaning each time. It is a real state ("I was always happy"), then a mask ("Pretend I'm happy"), then something other people must deliver ("make me happy"). "Fake" appears twice, attached to a smile and a laugh, the expressions other people can see, in contrast to the sobs that belong to night and the shower.
The opening lines are the most interesting, and a little tangled. The speaker claims to have been "always happy" and in the next breath mentions sobs they "didn't hide." Someone who is always happy doesn't usually have sobs to hide. Read closely, the lines suggest that the old self cried openly and did not count that as unhappiness. What has changed is concealment. The grammar slips as well. After "didn't," we expect past-tense verbs, but "Pretend I'm happy" arrives in the present, as if today's self interrupts the memory mid-sentence. Whether deliberate or just the looseness of speech, the effect is the same. The word "always" may be nostalgia talking, since the past looks smoother from where the speaker now sits.
The imagery is small and domestic: night, a shower, a smile, a laugh. That is where its force lies. Running water can cover the sound of crying, and night is when no one is watching, so these details suggest a routine of private collapse and public brightness. The roughness of the language suits a poem about dropping polish. "Now only few know the real me" is slightly ungrammatical, the way real speech is. "I actually liked who I am" mixes a past verb with a present one, a small slip that lets the present leak into the past, as though the person once liked has not entirely vanished.
The last lines turn the refrain inside out. "Once upon a time" is the formula that opens stories, yet here it opens an elegy, and the speaker's happy past begins to sound as remote and unreal as a fairy tale. Then comes the wish: "Wishing this was a fairy tale." In a fairy tale, unhappiness is only a chapter, and the final page is guaranteed. The word "finally" in the closing line carries a lot of tiredness. That line is also the longest in the poem and the only one to end with a full stop. The poem spends its whole length without closing, and the one sentence that does close is about an ending the speaker cannot reach.
The poem is worth reading for its recognisable, unshowy honesty. It names no event and no villain, and it never explains what went wrong. That absence may be its strength, because anyone who has smiled while feeling something else can slot in their own reason. It also relies on a phrase every reader already knows, so when "once upon a time" turns sad, the shift lands with the small shock of something familiar gone wrong.