the anatomy of an unraveling poem

“i just don’t get it. 

we did everything together

and planned the rest of our lives with each other,

so how did we go from always to almost?...”

-pg 77 of from you, to you 

this poem is definitely in my top three favorites from my newest collection. i love it not just because of what it says, but because of how it says it. 

when it comes to my poetry, i try to be creative in the pieces that leave room for creativity, and this one practically begged for it.

as you keep reading the poem, you’ll notice that the poem itself starts to unravel. 

the first stanza looks completely normal. 

the second one has a few misspellings. 

the third one is mostly misspellings. 

and the final one? full-on gibberish. 

it was a bold choice (my editor even began fixing my intentional typos haha), but i wanted to visually mirror the emotional unraveling of a relationship in both meaning and form. here's the thing: when a relationship stops working, it almost never happens overnight. it isn’t a neat switch from “i can’t imagine us falling apart” to “i can’t imagine us growing back together.” it’s slow. subtle. sometimes so gradual that your heart creates an optical illusion to protect you from the truth. 

you start convincing yourself that what you’re seeing isn’t really what you’re seeing.

and then, before you know it, you’re standing in a field of red flags you didn’t even notice growing. you know exactly where the exit is, but your heart keeps tugging at your sleeve, asking you to stay just a little longer. that emotional blind spot—the denial, the unraveling, the shock—is what i wanted the poem to capture. that’s why the poem ends with the same line it starts with. the whole piece acts like a trance, and that repeated line snaps you back into yourself.

now, as for the actual work behind the poem… you’d think writing gibberish would be easy. 

tl;dr: it was not. 

autocorrect waged war against me. my fingers refused to cooperate. years and years of spelling bees came back to haunt me like, “we trained for THIS and you’re doing WHAT now?” i had to fight every instinct in my grammatical body to intentionally misspell words. 

but after a lot of trial and error 

(and by trial and error, i mean finding just the right balance between readable, messy, and completely undone), 

i finally landed exactly where i wanted to be: a visual representation of a relationship falling apart right in front of the reader’s eyes.

this poem unraveled the way many relationships do: slowly, subtly, and then all at once. and, if i’m being honest, writing it helped me understand my own unraveling, too. it demanded honesty from me, both in what i said and how i let it fall apart. although i was forced to go twelve rounds with autocorrect and betray every spelling bee trophy i ever earned, in the end, i created the messiest, most intentional disaster i’ve ever written. 

sometimes, that’s what art asks of you: to take something that once made no sense and give it a form, even if the form is chaos on purpose. and once it’s on the page, the unraveling feels a little less like a loss and a little more like clarity.