A title like "The End" promises a closed book, and the poem spends every line refusing to shut it. The speaker addresses a former lover who seems to be rewriting their shared past. The reply is not an argument but a stubborn, openly irrational loyalty: I know this may be a lie, the speaker says, and I believe it anyway. The central idea is that feeling can outlast a relationship, and that holding on to it is itself a kind of storytelling.
That is the poem's sharpest irony. It opens by accusing the other person of authorship: "you seem to have re-written, / the story of what was once you and me." Just before that comes a hedge, "Maybe it was just a slip of the tongue," in which the speaker makes an excuse on the lover's behalf, as if even now they would rather soften the blow. The stray comma after "re-written" cuts the verb off from its object, a small stumble that feels like a catch in the throat. The lover's action is deliberate: "put as much distance as you can" suggests effort, while the speaker is left passive. Then the layout does the work. "between then &" breaks off, and "now" is pushed far across the page, so the reader has to travel the distance the lover wants.
Next the poem watches memory die. "Your eyes, / the smiles & the all that time spent together" tumbles out as a list, and the clumsy "the all that time" reads like someone fumbling through a rush of recollection. Then comes a prediction: "the touch of all those memories / will disappear." Calling memory a touch makes it something felt on the skin, so losing it becomes a physical loss. Only "the faintest trace" will remain, and the ellipsis after "remain…" lets the sentence fade out, enacting what it describes.
The turn is a single question: "can believing a lie make it a truth?" It is the only question in the poem, and the speaker answers it with an admission: "I believe in the lie / that you still love me too." The word "lie" is the speaker's own choice, so this is self-knowledge rather than naivety. The poem also allows itself one clear rhyme here, as "too" is answered by "you" in "that heart belongs to you." Elsewhere the poem is loose free verse with uneven lines and no pattern of end rhyme, so this sound-match feels like the speaker's wish for things to fit together again. The line between is open to two readings. "The heart beating beside me every night" could be a remembered or imagined partner, or the speaker's own heart, keeping company in the dark. Either way, it is claimed for "you."
The ampersands deserve a glance too. "Then & now," "smiles &," "& only the faintest trace": the symbol is quick and informal, like something typed rather than carefully drafted, which suits the unguarded tone. It is also a symbol of joining, and it keeps turning up in a poem about being pulled apart.
The ending narrows in. "Wherever we find ourselves next" keeps the speaker and lover as "we" even in separation. "Whoever else you let into your bed" makes the lover the gatekeeper and any new partner a mere visitor, which is both bitter and oddly tender in how little it asks. Then the final line stands alone: "the feeling is still in my chest." It is plain and bare of metaphor. The speaker says "feeling" rather than "love," and "chest" quietly echoes the earlier heart, as though the body is keeping what the mind has been told to release. The closing full stop at last supplies the ending the title promised, but it closes on the feeling, not on the relationship.
Part of what makes the poem worth reading is that it avoids the two easy routes of lost-love writing, grief and rage. Instead it admits self-deception, and it does so without asking for pity. Both people are rewriting the story: the lover edits the past out, and the speaker edits the present so that love stays in it. The poem lets that symmetry stand. The name it was published under, wordsforghosts, seems fitting on a reading of the text, since the addressee is exactly that: absent from the bed, yet still living in the speaker's chest.