Hello,
Those are the first words one often speaks to long lost friend. Goodbye, the first words you spoke to me.
Dearest friend, I miss you; come home. Where are you now? Where have you gone? Where are you going next? These questions will be left unanswered. The answers will be left unknown. Too soon, too soon. You left too soon. Hello and goodbye, our whole conversation in a nutshell. Come back, I miss you. I miss you so. At the port I'll pick you up, I'll carry your bags and put them in the car. I'll take you to Wendy's, as long as you come home. When will you be back? When will I see you again? Goodbye, goodbye, never mind the plans. Say hello to Anna for me, stay there if you must. I'll say hello and goodbye to your family for you.
Goodbye.
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Canary word: Present
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,855 Reviews
Hello ello, Grape!
So, well, I like that sense of relationship with the hello and goodbye. And I like how you ended it with goodbye, a characteristic point to the first sentence. While I adore these two, I think you can work on the content of the letter. And I love the 'nutshell' sentence. Really do!
I think you're trying to talk about a lost friend. Which, yes, can be heartbreaking. And I get that your MC is filled with questions. But I think you can show us some more about this world that they built in that seemingly small moment.
As Laure said repetition may not really work best in the letter format. Unless of course this is a ;etter that can't be posted and is sort of the MC pouring his mind voices out. In that case, I would suggest you read it out loud and identify strong places where you can use repetition. Because I think that can work brilliantly in such a scene.
Cheers,
Lava
Interesting- especially how you state that "Goodbye" is the first thing the friend said to your narrator. Were they in a hurry at the time?
As far as I know, it's acceptable to refer back to past events in a fictional letter. That way your audience isn't left shaking their collective head and saying, "Wait, what happened?"
Hai GrapeNerd, Laure here for a short review. So, I'm going to reverse my usual reviews and start off with the content.
This letter I assume addresses the issue of a long-lost friend and our MC clearly misses the friend and yet all they seem is saying goodbyes forever. This story, though short does have quite a melancholy and very poetic and lyrical feel to it. To me, this was more like a prose than a short story by the ways you arranged your sentences and how it was written.
However, for a while the MC just seems to bombarding us with questions. I mean I know this is a letter and all but at least let the readers get some of the answers instead of just putting questions after questions on the page.
You also tend to repeat things too, not sure why because if this was a letter, I doubt you'd do that which is why I say this is more suited to a prose style.
^See the triple too soon, that's a very lyrical way to write something. You usually wouldn't do that with a short story or a letter.
Alrighty, so this a letter so I can't really say that you're telling and narrating everything to us instead of showing it. Though I will still reinforce that you show us some of these emotions instead of putting them in question. And if you have questions, put in some answers that will perhaps paint a picture. I mean there is a lot of potential hidden in this story, you could really do something great with this. I felt as if all the questions are so abrupt and the answers even so. So, take your time and you could develop this.
The ending I suppose, was an oxymoron to the start and like you said, wrapping the whole conversation in a nutshell. I think you can definitely develop this, I mean this seems like the skeleton of a story to me. Keep developing and try and stop narrating everything to us and use figurative language, provide some answers so that we don't feel like we've just had a load of questions dumped on our heads.
Kudos, happy writing!
~Laure