"I miss you" opens Brittany Allen's untitled poem, returns twice in the first three lines, and is still there in the last stanza. The poem never moves far from that refrain. The speaker misses someone who, as she admits almost at once, "aren't mine" and "never have been." What she misses is being cared for. Her central idea is that care and love can look so alike that the difference becomes unbearable, especially when only one person feels the love.
The opening lines show her thinking in real time. "You never have been but.." breaks off, with two dots instead of the usual three, as if she can't finish the sentence or doesn't want to. She goes on to build a small argument: "I love you and you care about me, / are they not the same deep down?" It ends in a question, not a statement, and the question is the most honest moment in the poem. She isn't reporting a conclusion. She is hoping someone will agree. Just before it, she says her feelings "don't matter," which the rest of the poem quietly contradicts.
The middle stanza is where the poem warms up. Its details are small and physical: "your arms reassuring me, / a smirk that you know I like, / that tone of voice." The phrase "you know" keeps returning, and the repetition turns knowing into a kind of intimacy. He knows what makes her smile, so she can smile "confidently, no faking or lying." That phrase suggests, judging by the text, that she is not always so unguarded around other people. The same knowledge becomes a trap in the next line: "You know how I cannot say no to you." What gives him this power is the very thing she treasures.
The poem then admits what the earlier lines were avoiding. He is "both good and bad for me," and "at the same time as making me happy you make me cry." The memory behind the tears is told flatly: "heart on my sleeve and feelings laid out, / you simply said it wasn't like that." The idiom "heart on my sleeve" is a worn one, but it suits a voice that sounds like speech and not performance. The two adverbs are the sharpest words here. For him, saying no is "simply" done. For her, being turned down means she was "merely a friend." One person is casual and the other is diminished. "Merely" also answers an earlier word. He was "the only one who cares," "the only thing both good and bad," "the only one that makes things right again." To her he is the only one, and to him she is merely a friend.
The form fits this mood. The poem is free verse, with no regular rhyme and no steady meter. Lines run from three words ("I miss you.") to long, spilling ones like "at the same time as making me happy you make me cry." Capitalization wobbles between "I" and "i" and between capital and lowercase line openings. I can't tell whether this is deliberate, but it gives the poem the feel of something written fast, close to the feeling and before it could be tidied. Most lines end on a comma or full stop and few run on, so thoughts come out one at a time, like someone talking herself through it.
The ending is plain too: "Now i sit here and write poetry. / you are not here and i miss you." The poem names its own reason for existing. Writing is what she does in his absence, and it fills his place without replacing him. The last line, "the only one that makes things right again," carries an admission without drawing attention to it. Things can only be put right again if something has gone wrong, and the person she credits with the repair is also the one who made the damage.
The poem's significance lies in this honesty, not in polish. It records how a person can argue herself toward hope, notice the flaw in the argument, and still miss someone anyway. Many readers will know that mix of tenderness and embarrassment, and the poem doesn't tidy it up. It ends where it began, in the same longing.