Running is the poem's first confession and its central trick. "I run from my feelings / Literally" sets up a metaphor, then steps on it in a single word. The speaker is not only fleeing emotionally but actually pounding down a road "as fast as I can." Because "Literally" gets a line to itself, the pause before it feels like a half-smile, a bit of dry self-awareness before the poem turns serious.
The form is as bare as the feeling. There is no rhyme and there is no punctuation, so the lines pile up like footfalls, short and uneven, with nothing to slow them except the line breaks. The language is conversational ("gonna," "I wish I would have never met you"), closer to something said aloud or typed in a notes app than to a crafted lyric. That plainness is a choice with an effect. The poem never dresses its pain up, so the reader hears it undiluted. The lack of full stops also lets the poem run without pausing, a quiet echo of its subject.
Several phrases carry more than one meaning. "Until I feel like I'm gonna break down" works for a body giving out at the end of a sprint and for an emotional collapse. Running is meant to escape the feeling, yet it brings her to the very edge of it. Then comes "It all started with you / As it always does." The second line is flat and tired, and "always" suggests this is not the first run or the first time the same thought has been the starting point. The speaker seems to have a habit of escaping, and the habit has not worked.
The wish that follows, "I wish I could run away / And turn back time," shows why. A runner can cover distance but not undo it, and the speaker is trying to use a forward motion to reach backward. Her next wish is the bluntest in the poem: she would never have met this person at all. Yet the next lines complicate that wish, because "You changed me so much" leads straight into the poem's most interesting turn.
That turn is a split in the speaker's identity. She will "never get myself back," but then says, "I don't want that girl back." The earlier self becomes "that girl," a third person, someone seen from a distance. Then two lines hold opposing feelings side by side: "I'm stronger now / But I still miss her." Neither cancels the other. Strength does not erase tenderness for the person she used to be, and the poem is wise enough not to pretend it does. This is also where the earlier wish to have "never met" the other person starts to look less simple. The speaker can't wish away the experience without wishing away the stronger self it produced.
The last movement brings in a new partner, "him," and a small, sharp piece of honesty: "I compared him to you / And almost ended it at the similarities." The past person is still working as a measuring stick and nearly ruins something new. The rebuttal, "But he's not you," is the shortest sentence in the poem, almost a reminder she gives herself. The other person is never described. We get no name, no memory, no detail, only "you." That blank makes the ex less a character than a pressure, something felt more than seen.
The final line, "You don't control my life anymore," is a declaration, but it is worth asking how settled it is. "Anymore" admits that control once existed, and the poem began with someone running down a road in the present tense. Perhaps the line is a conclusion, or perhaps it is something she says to herself mid-stride, hoping to make it true by saying it. The poem leaves both readings open.
That honesty is what makes it worth reading. It does not offer a tidy recovery story. It shows someone who is stronger and still hurting, free in her claims and still running. For a reader who has tried to outpace a feeling, the poem's simple wording is part of its force, because it sounds like the thing people actually think and rarely say well.