A birthday normally belongs to the person born on it, but in thatonekidsusannah's «Take II on Birthday» it belongs to the person left behind. The speaker marks the date of someone who was once close and is now gone, and insists the day means nothing. The poem then gradually shows that claim failing. Its central idea is that we don't get to decide what we remember. Trying to be indifferent only proves how much attachment is still there.
The opening is flat and almost reluctant: "It's that day." The word "that" assumes the reader already knows which day, as if the speaker can't avoid the date even in her own head. The next sentence, "A day that really has no meaning to me, / Or shouldn't, anyway," shows the poem's method in miniature. The speaker states a position and then corrects herself mid-breath. "Really" sounds like someone protesting a little too much, and "shouldn't" admits that the indifference is a rule she is trying to follow, not a feeling she has.
The poem's vocabulary comes back again and again to one word: "day." It appears in "the day you were born," "few thousand days," "a few dozen days later," "another day for me" and "another day lonely." The speaker measures the relationship in days, with the dry precision of someone who has done the sums too many times. "Few thousand days I actually knew" sounds like a ledger entry. Then comes the longest, least controlled line, in which the person "left me broken down worse than when I met you." The line sprawls past the neat, short ones around it, as if the hurt won't fit the space. Judging by "worse than when I met you," the speaker was already low when they met, and the "broken down" phrasing suggests something that once worked and has stopped.
The colon-and-list passage is the poem's turning point. "I can suppress a lot of things about you:" promises control, and "suppress" is a deliberate, effortful verb. But what follows is tender. "Memories" stands alone as a single word, and then come three lines about being seen: how the other person "talked me up when I was down," "found the happy in me," and treated flaws as "beautiful quirks." Turning the adjective "happy" into a noun gives it a simple, almost childlike warmth. The speaker never says she misses this. She just lists it accurately, and then catches herself: "Considering I can list them, I guess I'm not the best forgetting." The poem becomes its own evidence. She tried to suppress these things, and the list proves she couldn't. The clipped, colloquial "not the best forgetting" fits the tone, because it is too casual to be dramatic. The title's "Take II" may hint at a second attempt at the subject, though that is only an inference from the title.
There is no rhyme and no regular rhythm. The lines are free-verse fragments, sometimes a single word, sometimes a whole breathless clause, and they sound like thinking out loud. The one real figure of speech is the simile of a day that "sticks in my brain like glue." It is ordinary, but that suits a poem about something stubborn and unglamorous. Calling the memory "a habit I didn't know I had" is more interesting. A habit is something the body does without permission, and that takes the blame off the speaker, who can't be accused of choosing to remember.
The ending returns to the poem's key word with a shift. "When the day passes by, it'll be another day for me" sounds like the indifference she wanted. Then the last line, "Another day lonely," repeats the phrase and breaks the grammar, ending on a bare adjective with nothing after it. The word "another" also implies that the other days are lonely too, so the birthday hurts partly because it is no different from the rest.
The poem is modest, but it is honest about a very ordinary kind of grief, the kind tied to a date on the calendar. It doesn't dress the pain up or arrive at any consolation. It lets the speaker's attempt at detachment collapse under its own list, and the reader watches that happen in real time.