A letter addressed to a number is already strange, and Vanessa's "Dear 87" never explains the strangeness. It simply begins and lets the reader feel the missing name. The speaker is awake at night, haunted by someone's absence, and moves through accusation, fear and a forced politeness before landing on a closing line of pure sarcasm. The central idea is that absence is not empty. It is active, noisy and invasive, and the person who left remains more present than ever.
The poem never says who or what "87" is, or why the person is gone, so the cause could be a breakup, an estrangement or something more final. Judging by the text, the number may be a way of refusing to say a name, or a label that turns a person into a figure that can be pushed away. Either way, the opening lines set up the poem's key paradox: "The blank of absence keeps me stirring / The sound of nothing." Blankness shouldn't stir anything and nothing shouldn't make a sound, yet the speaker hears it. Silence here is loud.
The poem is in free verse, with short lines and almost no rhyme, so it reads like thoughts arriving in pieces at 3 a.m. The one clear rhyme is "Your smile breaks my heart / Your laugh tears me apart." These lines are the most conventional in the poem, almost a greeting-card pairing, and they sit right where the speaker admits to missing the person. The neat sound makes the pain feel rehearsed, as if this thought has been repeated many times. Line breaks do other work. "My mind has left / You. You did this." pauses on "left" long enough to suggest the mind has left the speaker, and only then does "You" arrive as a target. Soon after, "It cant go away. / Why would you?" slides from "it" (the absence) to "you" (the person), and the two become hard to tell apart.
The imagery is built from darkness and creeping. "In the silence dark lurks" turns "dark" into a noun, almost a creature, and it "creeps it's way into my head." The grammar is a little rough here, with the missing apostrophe in "cant" and the extra one in "it's," but this fits a voice that sounds unedited and spoken in the moment. Then comes the line that twists everything: "In the absence of nothing / Is where you belong." Taken literally, the absence of nothing would be something, so the line is confusing on purpose. It is also cruel. It places the person in the void and suggests they and the emptiness are the same thing.
The middle of the poem tries a different tone, that of the generous, composed speaker. "Leave me / Here / I'll be better without you / Really." The one-word lines isolate the speaker on the page, and "Really." is the giveaway, since nobody who means it needs to add it. The same happens in "Just... Don't worry about / Me. Alone. Here." The ellipsis is a hesitation, and the full stops chop the sentence into three flat beats. The politeness is a performance, and it cracks as it is delivered.
The ending turns the poem on its head. A voice says, "Hello it's your nightmare / Come to wake you / From your sweet / Dreamland." The speaker, who has been haunted all along, now imagines becoming the haunting, with 87 as the sleeper in a "sweet dreamland" and the speaker as the intruder. The final lines then close off any escape: "But it's not a dream / Nor a nightmare / For this is real. / And I have you to thank." The last sentence sounds like gratitude and is really an accusation. The poem has worked toward it since "You did this."
What makes "Dear 87" worth reading is how much emotional movement it fits into so little space. It moves from longing to fear, to fake calm, to open bitterness, and each stage is shown through form as well as content. The reader is left with a speaker who cannot sleep, cannot forgive, and cannot stop writing to the one who is not there.