Poems about loss usually reach for graves and last goodbyes. "living" does something quieter and, in its way, crueler. Its title, together with the question "how have you been?", suggests that the person being missed is still out there somewhere, perhaps healthy, perhaps laughing, perhaps even missing the speaker back. The poem never says what happened between them. What it describes is an absence that could in theory be undone, and that possibility is exactly what keeps the ache open. There is no funeral and no ritual, only a person going on living somewhere else.
The structure is plain and carefully built. Three short stanzas rest on a repeated opening, "i haven't heard," "i haven't seen," and that repetition works like counting. The speaker takes inventory of what is missing, one sense at a time: voice, smile, laugh, eyes. Each stanza ends by breaking the pattern, and the break matters. "I haven't" is a phrase that waits, because it implies a "yet." But the closing lines slip into "i don't": "i don't wake up to you when i have nightmares," and finally "i don't know you anymore." The grammar moves from a temporary gap to a settled fact. The speaker begins by describing what hasn't happened and ends by admitting that something has changed for good.
The nightmare line is the most revealing detail in the poem. It is the only moment the speaker talks about their own suffering, and it shows what kind of closeness has been lost. To wake up to someone after a bad dream is to be comforted in a very unguarded moment. The speaker does not say "I miss you" in so many words. They name the thing that used to make the dark bearable and leave the reader to feel its absence.
The short middle stanza is the emotional hinge. After the list of lacks, the speaker suddenly speaks to the other person directly: "how have you been? / do you miss me?" The two questions are small and almost polite, like something you might type and delete a dozen times. Nothing answers them, and the stanza's brevity makes the silence louder. For two lines the poem leans toward hope, and then it goes back to the inventory, now sadder than before.
That return brings the poem's most striking image, "your emerald green eyes." Everything else in the poem is general, a voice, a smile, a laugh, but here the speaker is suddenly precise, and the colour is the only one in the poem. The word "emerald" suggests something rare and prized, held onto carefully. Then comes the paradox of the last line. The speaker remembers the exact shade of those eyes and still says "i don't know you anymore." Memory has kept the details sharp, but knowing a person means keeping up with who they are now, and that is the part the speaker has lost. They have the portrait but no longer the person.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme, and the lines are short and conversational, closer to speech than to song. The long "ee" sound still echoes quietly through "seen," "me," "been" and "green," as if the poem keeps circling the same sad note. The lowercase lettering and the lack of end punctuation, even after the last line, leave the poem feeling unfinished. It simply stops, which is how this kind of grief tends to go: there is no final full stop, because the person is not gone, only out of reach.
What makes the poem significant is how honestly it describes this less-recognised kind of loss. Grief for someone who has died is socially understood, but grief for someone who is alive and unreachable has no ceremony and no clear ending, and it can feel strangely illegitimate. By leaving the "you" unnamed and the reasons unexplained, the poem lets any reader fill in their own story, whether a friend, a partner or a family member. Its simple language does the rest, and its last line carries the harshest recognition: the person you miss may be the very one you no longer know.