Most poems about loss mourn what has gone. This one tries to cheat the system. Its speaker has noticed a pattern: everything that brings comfort and peace eventually leaves. So they propose a trick played on fate itself. If they could start finding comfort in the things they most want rid of (lonely nights, broken hearts, sad smiles), perhaps those things would walk out of their life too. The central idea is a bleak, darkly witty piece of logic that grows out of repeated loss. If nothing good stays, the only strategy left is to love what hurts and hope it behaves like everything else. Underneath the cleverness is a confession that the speaker trusts neither happiness to last nor pain to go, unless it is tricked.
The first two lines do much of the work. "everything I find comfort, peace in" is an awkward sentence that ends on a dangling preposition, so the reader waits for a verb. When it comes, it comes alone: "leaves." One word, one line, a full stop. The line break acts out the meaning, since the word is left by itself, just as the speaker has been. For a moment "leaves" might even look like a noun, foliage, something calm and green, until the full stop shows it is a verb. Comfort turns into departure inside a single word. The comma in "comfort, peace" also makes the speaker sound as if they are searching for the right term. When the pair returns in line three it is reversed and smoothly joined: "peace and comfort." That ease suggests the speaker already knows the vocabulary of sadness by heart.
The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular metre, and its line lengths carry the feeling. Counting words, the lines run six, one, sixteen, two and six. The long third line sprawls across the page, a list of three paired nouns that piles up the way loneliness does. The short lines on either side are clipped and final. "sad smiles" is the most telling item. A smile is supposed to signal happiness, so the phrase hints that the speaker is used to hiding feeling, though the poem never says so. Everything is lowercase except "I," which gives the voice a hushed, diary-like tone, as if the thought were being said under the breath.
Sound ties the poem together. "leaves," "lonely" and "leave" share an opening l, so the word that wounds in line two is quietly present in the middle and returns at the end. The grammar flips too. At the start "everything" is the subject doing the leaving. At the end "they" are the subject, and "me" is the one left behind. The speaker is the person things happen to, in the first line and in the last.
Then there is "maybe." Counting the title, "just maybe" appears twice, with a third "maybe" in "maybe if I started" and a fourth in "maybe they will leave me too." The repetition is hedging. This speaker cannot state a hope outright, so hope is allowed only as a possibility. "Just" works two ways, as "only" and as "barely," shrinking the wish further. The comma after "just maybe," in line four reads like a held breath before the final line.
The last word, "too," is where the pain shows. It lines up sadness with every other thing that has left. The poem's logic also quietly folds back on itself. For the trick to work, sadness would have to become a comfort, and then, by the speaker's own rule, it would leave, and they would be bereft again. The wish for relief and the fear of being left with nothing are tangled together, and the poem does not untangle them.
That is what makes it worth reading. In five short lines it captures a kind of magical thinking that people fall into after loss, bargaining with fate because nothing else seems to work. It does not offer consolation or a neat moral. A single stranded word, a repeated "maybe" and one small "too" carry the emotion, and the reader is trusted to feel the rest.