"Ghosted by you in Toulouse." The poem opens and closes on that line, and the small change between the two appearances carries the whole story. At the start it is a bare fact, dropped without explanation. At the end it comes with a "Guess that's why" in front of it, as if the speaker has finally done the sums. In between sits a memory so tender that the final explanation lands like a joke at the speaker's own expense.
The poem recalls a moment shared in June: a hand on a chest, heads side by side, two people looking at the moon. It then admits that the closeness was not mutual in the way the speaker believed. Judging by the last lines, he learned too late that the other person "weren't really into dudes." The central idea is the gap between two versions of the same night. What felt to one person like something outside time was, to the other, evidently something else. The poem is also about how people cope with that discovery, which here means laughing before anyone else can.
The construction is stripped down. Lines are very short, and many stand alone like single breaths or text messages. There is no regular metre. The rhythm comes from repetition and fragments. "Never wanted to sleep. / Never wanted to dissolve this" beats twice on the same phrase, and "We just lay there. / Staring at the moon. / Dreaming of Toulouse" stacks three fragments to slow the poem into stillness. The longest lines, "Our hearts, our minds, not adhering to the rules of time" and "Alive in the infinity, when Julember turned into 1965", are also the only ones printed without a gap after them. Here the poem stops breathing and the feeling swells.
Sound does more than decoration. The poem's hook is a run of *-ooz* rhymes: Toulouse, lose, and later news and dudes (a near-rhyme), with "rules" echoing inside the dreamy middle. In the opening, "nothing to gain… nothing to lose" has the lilt of a pop lyric. By the end the same rhyme has turned comic, because pairing a French city with "dudes" is deliberately absurd. The sound that once promised romance now delivers the punchline.
That clash of registers is the poem's main device. "Drown in your scent" and "alive in the infinity" belong to the vocabulary of the love lyric, while "I guess I never did get the news" is casual and deadpan. The drop from "infinity" to "dudes" is bathos, and it works as self-protection. The speaker will not sound wounded, so he sounds flippant. Even "really" in "weren't really into dudes" hedges, and it suggests he still cannot say exactly what the other person felt.
The poem also contradicts itself. "I had nothing to gain, I had nothing to lose" is bravado, because the next lines beg. "Can you call my name like then?" is the only question in the poem, and it is the emotional peak. Ghosting means it goes unanswered. The word "Just" keeps shrinking the speaker's demands: "Just a moment," "Just let me drown," "We just lay there." He asks for so little, as if modesty might win it.
The coined month "Julember" is the most inventive detail. It reads as July fused with one of the "-ember" months, a calendar collapsing as the lovers ignore "the rules of time." The sudden "1965" fits that reading, since it feels like a year plucked from an older, more romantic age, though the poem never explains it. Toulouse works in a similar way. It is the place the lovers dream of, and also the place where the speaker is abandoned. That suggests the imagined future and the loss were tied to the same spot.
The poem is worth reading because it fits the language of modern dating, "ghosted" and "dudes" included, into the old shape of the lost-love lyric, and it will not choose between sincerity and joke. The ending changes how we read everything before it. The "infinity" was real to the speaker but one-sided, and the earlier lines become poignant. A ghost is someone who vanishes, yet the poem keeps that person vividly present in the speaker's memory. The poem is haunted by the very thing it jokes about.