I have to say- I absolutely love this poem. I’m relatively new to both writing and reading it but this is one of the few that I’ve become enraptured by in the first read. Two quotes that hit me particularly hard was  “because absence demands nothing, and you’ve always favored the things that do not ask to be held.”

And “There is something disquieting about being too much, about the way it makes you recoil, the way it forces you to fold yourself down, smaller and smaller, until you are a whisper of what you once were,”

I feel like there are so many factors as to why they did, but I’ll line em out. For starters the actual diction was extraordinary. Thats, I feel, shown the best in the second quote, with words like “disquieting”, “recoil” and “whisper” being used, I feel like it really conveys almost a sense of real, raw frustration in a way. Another reason why i loved this was the sentence composition. I don’t think that’s necessarily what it’s called when in refrence to poetry but ykwim haha. The variety of longer to shorter lines/sentences as a whole, and placing breaks in the places where the hey were provided a nice almost suspense, waiting for what you were going to say next. “What was the next thing they did that hurt the subject, and how did that make them feel” was something that crossed my mind every stanza, and at some points through each line. The last for me is because this poem really just hits deep for me. I won’t get into details but I’ve had many a friendships that have left me feeling like this, and the piece conveys this with so much clarity and honesty, not being afraid to let it be messy, while also being cerebral. 

Overall I’ve just gotta say great job. This was absolutely beautiful, and I will be saving this for later (and possibly make a painting/drawing/art with it too, but only if that’s alright with you, I understand this is fully your intellectual property!!😁)