The speaker senses that something painful is about to repeat itself. A year has passed, but the fear hasn't faded, and the opening lines ("its coming again") have the dread of someone watching a storm roll in. What makes it worse is that other people notice it too and say so, yet the speaker has trained themselves to shrug it off.
The rest of the poem is a list of small hurts: friends who don't reply, who talk over them, who walk ahead because the pavement is "too small," who care about everyone except the speaker. None of these is dramatic on its own, and that is the point. They add up to a steady feeling of being unimportant. The repeated word "friends" starts to sound hollow, and the final line, with "friends" in quotation marks, shows the speaker doubting the word itself. The mood is quiet, tired and sad, with a flat, almost resigned tone that makes the loneliness feel familiar and unfair.