"Bittersweet" is the word people reach for when they cannot decide how to feel, and Susovan's poem opens by admitting that indecision. The speaker doesn't say the relationship was bittersweet. They say it is what they "would call it", a hedged, almost reluctant label, as if someone had asked and this was the closest answer on offer. The poem then tests the label against memory. By the end it has turned the word from a description into a promise: the lingering pain is the only thing keeping the other person present.
The structure makes this shift visible. The phrase "Bittersweet / is what I would call it" appears twice, and the repetition works like a refrain. The first time, it leads into "trying desperately not to regret", a strained, defensive effort. The second time, it leads into something warmer and sadder: "I really did enjoy having you in my life." Same word, different weight. In the final stanza "Bittersweet" is no longer a verdict on the past but something that lives "inside of us", a shared possession that the speaker hopes will "never fade."
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines are short, often only two or three words, and the white space between them acts as the rhythm. A word like "Bittersweet", alone on its line, forces a pause before the sentence continues. The pairing "Our faces / laughing. / My face / crying." makes a small drama of the line breaks. The plural "our" shrinks to a singular "my" within four lines, and the verbs sit alone, cut off like the two emotions they name. Then comes the flat, unadorned "I was always crying." The word "always" quietly undercuts the laughter. It suggests the happiness was real but never reached the speaker's whole inner life.
The middle stanzas are the most revealing, partly because of what they leave vague. "You vowed to never go back" doesn't say back to what. Judging by the phrasing, it could be a past life, a habit or a person, but the poem withholds it, and the vagueness keeps attention on the speaker's reaction: "You said you were strong. / You convinced me." Those are short, trusting sentences, and the word "convinced" hints that the belief took some effort. "Your love was much more than anything" is similarly unspecific. It reaches for a superlative without a comparison, as if the speaker cannot find a measure large enough.
The most telling confession is "I tried to savour it. / Because I knew / it would not last. / It never did." The speaker was grieving while still inside the happiness, tasting the sweetness with the loss already in view. "It never did" can be read as a bare fact about this relationship, but it can also suggest a pattern, that good things have never lasted for them. The unguarded afterthought "May be i was not enough" fits that reading. The split "May be" and the lowercase "i" make it look hurried, like a thought that slipped out. Whether deliberate or not, the effect is of self-blame arriving without ceremony.
The last stanza holds the poem's central idea, and its logic is unusual. Most poems about loss hope for healing. This speaker hopes the hurt will stay, because forgetting would mean the love had been erased. The sentence breaks across a stanza, "because then it would mean // I forgot you", so the final line stands alone with nothing after it. That isolation echoes the title, "Bittersweet, I forgot you", which now reads as the speaker's fear, not a statement of fact. The pain is a form of loyalty.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It is plain-spoken and not especially ornate, but it captures a feeling many people recognise and rarely admit: that moving on can feel like a betrayal, and that sometimes an ache is the last thing left to hold.