Three asterisks stand where a title should be, and that suits a poem about everything left unsaid. Its speaker has spent a long time supporting someone through depression, and the poem reveals what that support has cost. Beneath the loyalty lies a second, hidden struggle. The central idea is a painful paradox: the person who is always "there" for someone else may be the one who is quietly disappearing, and silence offered as love can turn into isolation.
The poem begins with "And", as if we have walked into the middle of a conversation or a long train of thought. The opening lines belong to the person being addressed: "every time you wanted to cry... every time you wanted to die." The speaker answers with a drumbeat of repetition, "I was there. / I was there for you." The lines are short and flat, with no rhyme and no decoration, and the plainness makes the devotion sound almost like a duty recited. Even the time the help takes is measured: "minutes," then "hours and even days." The speaker counts the friend's pain in hours but never gives their own pain a length, because in this poem it has no place to go.
The imagery is small but sharp. "I was your rock" suggests strength, but a rock is also something that does not cry, bend or ask for anything. The speaker has made themselves into an object that holds others up. Then comes the theatre metaphor: "I put on a show." A show needs an audience and a script, and the script here is a set of ordinary excuses: a headache, being tired, "people are just annoying." These are almost funny in how small they are next to what they hide. The last excuse is the most telling, because it quietly shifts the blame onto everyone else. The poem also pictures depression as something a person might fall back into: the fear is of the friend "crawling back," a verb that makes recovery sound like a hard climb that could be lost.
The most striking moment is the echo in the middle. The friend's wants were "to cry" and "to die." Later the speaker admits, "When all I want to do is cut. / Cry. / And die." The same words return, but now they are broken into single-word lines, as though the speaker can only say them one at a time. The poem adds the word "cut," so the speaker's pain is not only an echo of the friend's but is present in the body. The tense shift matters too. The first half is mostly in the past ("I was there"), while the confession arrives in the present ("I Pretend i am fine"). The helping has become a story that is over, but the hiding is happening now. The unpolished surface, with its stray capital, its lowercase "i," its trailing "So..", and the final "ate" that is presumably meant to be "are", gives the poem the feel of something written quickly and honestly rather than polished for display.
The ending is the cruelest turn. "I can't burden you with my problems. / When you ate getting better." The friend's progress becomes the reason for the speaker's silence, so good news turns into a lock. Nothing is resolved, and the poem simply stops. Judging by the text, the poem itself seems to be the one place where the speaker finally says what they cannot say aloud.
That is what makes it worth reading. It gives a voice to a situation that is easy to overlook: the caretaker friend whose own distress is invisible because they are so reliable. It also invites a response the speaker doesn't expect. The reasoning "I would be a burden" feels convincing from the inside, but a reader sees how much it costs. A poem like this, which mentions self-harm and suicide, should lead us to a simple conclusion: if you recognise yourself in the speaker, telling a trusted adult or someone you can rely on is not a failure to be a rock. It is what lets you stop being one.