Almost nothing happens in "where did it all go wrong", and that is the point. A girl lies in bed, looks at the ceiling and asks questions nobody answers. The poem is credited simply to "sarah", and since I know nothing about the writer, the "she" here is best read as a figure on the page rather than a stand-in for anyone real. What the poem gives us is the aftermath of some hurt: a wrecked body, a mind hunting for a cause, and a plea for the whole thing to make sense.
The imagery is almost entirely physical, and it is all damage. Her lips are "chapped and / bloody", her eyes "swollen and puffy", her limbs "weak and limp by / her side". The poem never says why. Swollen eyes suggest crying, and the chapped, bloody lips suggest hours of distress, but these are inferences, since the poem only shows the symptoms. Notice too that the body never *does* anything. Every description is a state, an adjective, and none is an action. Her arms don't reach and her hands don't clench. They simply lie "limp", as if she were an object left on the bed. The only active verb in the first stretch of the poem belongs to her mind: she "wondered". The body has given up, and only the questions keep going.
Those questions carry the poem's central idea, which is the helplessness of trying to explain pain you don't understand. Look at the pronouns. "Someone" did "that" to her, and she is left with "that feeling". The person is anonymous and the act has no name. Even the title's "it all" is a blur. The title and the closing lines also frame the problem differently. "Where did it all go wrong" imagines a process, something that drifted off course over time, while "how could someone do that to her?" imagines a single act by another person. The speaker seems caught between the two, unsure whether she is looking for a turning point or a culprit. That vagueness suits a mind too exhausted to be precise.
The form copies that exhaustion. There is no rhyme and no steady rhythm, just short lines of four or five syllables, broken in uncomfortable places. The line "limbs weak and limp by" stops on "by", leaving the limbs hanging before "her side" arrives, a small drop that mimics the collapse it describes. "Bloody" gets a line to itself, so the harshest word in the poem lands alone. The first nine lines form one long sentence with no commas or full stops, which gives a sense of lying there while thoughts run on without relief. The only punctuation is the two question marks, so the poem's one pause comes when it asks for help. Everything is in lowercase, even the name and the title, and the title sits inside guillemets (« »), like a thought quoted from inside her head. Lowercase gives the piece a quiet, confessional feel, as though it were being muttered rather than declared. The "laid" in the first line, where standard English would say "lay", adds to that unpolished, spoken tone.
The last two lines are the most telling. "What did she do to / deserve that feeling?" casts her as a defendant in her own case. She is the one wronged, yet she searches her own behaviour for the crime, and that instinct toward self-blame is the poem's saddest observation. The final word, "feeling", is also the most abstract in the poem, after all the concrete blood and swelling. The poem ends on something it can't show, and it offers no answer or comfort.
That refusal is what gives the poem its value. It doesn't explain, resolve or moralise. It stays in the bedroom with its subject and lets the unanswered question hang in the air. For a reader who has ever stared at a ceiling asking "why", the poem's bare, unadorned honesty is what makes it feel true.