Nothing dramatic happens in these lines, and that is exactly the point. There is no argument, no betrayal scene, no villain with a name. The speaker simply lists small neglects (unanswered messages, interrupted sentences, a narrow pavement) and lets them pile up until they become something frightening. The poem is credited to a name that looks like an online handle, sunnymagzuege, and carries a German title, «du verschwendest deine zeit 25» ("you are wasting your time"). It is about the dread of watching a painful pattern return, and about how hard it is to trust your own perception once you have grown used to being treated badly.
The opening is deliberately vague. "its coming again / its been a year" gives us a fear with no object. The poem never says what happened a year ago, and that silence makes the dread feel larger. The fear also shifts shape. First the speaker is "afraid of you," a person, then "afraid of the situation," a circumstance. The title's "du" raises a similar question. Is this something someone once said to the speaker, a piece of self-doubt, or a sentence aimed at the "you" of the opening? The text doesn't say, and I can't tell what the "25" refers to. The poem is in English under a German title, so it seems to sit between two languages.
The fifth line is the longest and the only one with real punctuation: "it is starting to happen again, i can feel it and others too, they even tell me." It runs on, commas strung together like a breathless confession. The detail that "others" confirm the feeling matters, because it shows the speaker is not imagining things. The word "even" carries a quiet disbelief, as if being warned by others were the last piece of evidence needed. Then comes the pivot: "but i am too normalised on having friends that dont answer." The phrase "normalised on" bends standard English slightly, which gives it a spoken, unpolished feel. The key word is "normalised." The problem is no longer only what the friends do, but how the speaker has adapted to it.
After that the poem turns into a list, and the form carries the argument. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes from the repeated "friends that," a tally in which each line is short and blunt. The items escalate. First absence ("dont answer"), then active dismissal ("ignore me when i need them"), then being drowned out ("talk over me"). The best image is the pavement: "friends that let me walk behind them because the pavement is too small." It turns social ranking into geometry, with the speaker always a step behind. The excuse, that the pavement is too small, sounds reasonable, and that is how this kind of neglect hides itself. Nobody has to admit to leaving anyone out.
The list then drops its imagery for the plainest line in the poem: "friends that care about everyone but me." Nothing is left to interpret, only the sting of "everyone but." Next, "the situation" returns. Earlier it named something the speaker feared, and now it names something the speaker is kept out of. It could mean a particular gathering or the whole group dynamic, but the repeated word links the fear to the exclusion.
Then comes one word: "friends," in quotation marks. These work as scare quotes, and they reach backward. Every "friends that…" before them now reads as a definition the speaker no longer believes. The form is also careful in a way the earlier lines are not. The lowercase letters and missing apostrophes ("dont," "im," "its") make the text read like something typed quickly in a bad moment, yet the ending is precisely placed.
The poem matters because it gives shape to a hurt that is easy to dismiss. No single line describes anything you could report or point to, but together they show how exclusion works: through accumulation, deniability, and the slow training of the person on the receiving end. It offers no resolution, and the speaker is still afraid when it stops. For a reader, the lesson is how much plain words, a repeated phrase, and one pair of quotation marks can do.