A look at how the novel follows emotional recollection rather than traditional narrative momentum.
For a long time, I worried that I wasn’t writing a story at all.
Yes, things were happening, but they weren’t happening in the way novels are expected to behave. I didn’t have any clear cause-and-effect scenarios in my writing, no reassuring sense that one event led logically to the next. Instead, scenes kept circling back on themselves. Moments kept on being repeated, if slightly altered.
For some, it might even be a criticism, that there is a lot of reading to do, with not much happening. It’s something I was afraid of early on, something I felt like I should change or revise into something much more coherent.
At some point, though, I stopped fighting it, and I haven’t looked back.
Because that, I realized, was the story.
Any writer worth their salt will tell you that plot is all about forward momentum, about cause and effect, escalation, resolution. They will tell you that things happen in acts, arcs, beginnings and ends. They will tell you that no event should leave a character exactly the same as they were before, that every moment should change something—a feeling, a situation, a circumstance.
And they’d be right. Completely. But that’s exactly why I decided to go against it. I knew the rules, and I knew life doesn’t obey them. I knew that’s not how our mind works; that’s not how we work. Our memory comes and goes, in disjointed fragments, unconnected from anything else, seeping into ordinary moments without warning. The trigger is almost instant; a smell, a place, a half-heard phrase, and suddenly you’re somewhere else entirely, reliving a moment that no longer exists but still has the power to undo you.
That’s the logic I was interested in. In Sometimes Goodbye, memory isn’t background material or exposition. It’s the engine driving the narrative. It moves not because events are unfolding, but because the characters keep revisiting what has already happened, trying, consciously or not, to understand it differently, to change its meaning, or simply to survive it.
This kind of storytelling can feel unsettling. There’s no comfort in thinking, ‘Right, we’ve dealt with that, let’s move on.’ Memory doesn’t allow for that sort of closure. It’s selective, unreliable, emotionally biased. It magnifies some details and erases others entirely. It insists on its own version of events, regardless of accuracy.
But that’s precisely why it felt honest, and why I stuck to it.
When something truly matters to us it doesn’t sit politely in the past. It demands attention in the present. It dominates our thoughts, reshapes how we see ourselves and how we interpret everything that follows.
To write a clean, forward-driving plot around that experience would have felt false.
Instead, the book follows the way memory behaves under emotional pressure: looping, stalling, fixating, contradicting itself. The same scene can feel tender one moment and unbearable the next, depending on who is remembering it and why.
Of course, I didn’t want to just be clever, or experimental for experimentation’s sake. I won’t even claim it to be successful—that’s for all of you, the ones reading it, to decide. To me, it’s an attempt to mirror something deeply familiar but rarely acknowledged: the fact that we live most of our lives inside memory, not outside it.
We don’t move past the past. We learn how to live with it. It doesn’t go away when we ‘move on.’
Writing memory instead of plot was my way of acknowledging that truth. Of allowing the story to behave the way the characters’ inner lives behaved, rather than forcing it into a shape that promised reassurance but delivered dishonesty.
Not every story needs to end with answers. Some end with realizations and recognition of what was already there but kept on being refused to be seen.
To me that was enough.