la tristesse durera toujours — Summary

You’re gone:

a leap, the water beneath,

& now I’ll never see you again.

You’re gone…

fuck

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Few words carry a lot here. The speaker is addressing someone who has died, and the poem suggests the death came by a fall into water: "a leap, the water beneath." It never says whether the leap was chosen or accidental, and that gap makes it feel more raw, as if the speaker can't bring themselves to name what happened.

The epigraph, "la tristesse durera toujours" (sadness will last forever), sets the tone before the poem begins. After it, the lines are short and broken up. "You're gone" appears twice, the second time trailing off into an ellipsis, as though the speaker keeps trying to accept it and can't. The ampersand and the lowercase, casual feel make it sound like a thought typed or spoken in shock.

Then comes the single curse word, "fuck." It's blunt, and it works because everything else has been so restrained. The mood is numb disbelief tipping into anger and helplessness, with nothing neat to resolve it.

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