The poem runs on arithmetic. Three lines open identically, "When I was 15", and each adds a fact the speaker cannot change: she met someone, she fell in love, and he or she was 18. The central idea is the distance between feeling grown and being seen as grown. The speaker's love is real to her, but the person she loves treats it as something small. What makes the poem interesting is that she half agrees with them.
Look at the verbs in that opening run. "Met" and "fell in love" are actions, a movement toward someone. Then the third line drops the verbs and gives only a state of being: "you were 18." The other person is reduced to a number, and the number does the damage. Written as digits, the ages look like data on a form or evidence in an argument. The tense matters too. "When I was 15" is past tense, which suggests some time has gone by, yet the poem ends with the present-tense "I'm only a kid." The speaker looks back on the beginning of the feeling while still being stuck inside it.
The longest line, in the middle, is where the poem turns. "When will I realize that you will never look at me like I make you crazy, but look at me like I just said my first words." It has no punctuation and runs on like a thought she can't stop. Notice "when" rather than "if": the lesson is already settled, and she is waiting for herself to absorb it. The line sets two looks side by side. One is the look of desire, being someone who makes another person "crazy", wild and out of control. The other is the look an adult gives a toddler, delighted and fond, praising a small achievement. The second image is the cruel one because it isn't cruel. It is tenderness with no desire in it, and the speaker's ambitions shrink from driving someone mad to babbling a few syllables.
Then the poem changes register. "Please love me" is blunt and undecorated. The bargain that follows, "I'll be over you in a week", works as both bravado and strategy. She offers a deal that supposedly costs nothing, as if love were a craving that one good meal could cure. A week is a comically short time, and the shortness gives her away. Nobody makes such an offer unless the feeling is heavy enough to need minimizing.
The final line, "Because I'm only a kid, and I don't know what love is", does the most with the least. "Because" ties it to the week-long promise, so the speaker is now supplying the reasoning herself. "Only" and "kid" sound like words borrowed from the older person's mouth, and she uses their dismissal as her own defense. The line carries a quiet irony. Someone who truly didn't know what love was would hardly need to write this poem, or to bargain this carefully. The sentence claims ignorance, yet the poem around it shows a precise, painful understanding of exactly where she stands.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are lineated like speech, or like a diary entry, short and flat on either side of the long middle. The plainness is the style. Nothing here is ornamented, which makes the confession feel unguarded. Even the title, "Older", is a comparative with nothing to compare against. It could name the person she loves, or what she wishes she were. Both readings work, and either way the single word names the whole obstacle.
The poem is worth reading for what it refuses to do. It never says what the older person did or said, and it accuses no one. It stays inside the speaker's head and lets her contradictions stand: she asks to be loved and in the next breath argues that she shouldn't be taken seriously. That double vision is more honest than a simple complaint would be. The name attached to the poem, "typical abigail", can be read as a similar move, a shrug that gets in ahead of the word "typical" before anyone else can say it. That is an inference from the name alone. What the text itself shows is a teenager treating her own feelings as both enormous and embarrassing, and a poem built so that readers can feel both at once.