Before the poem says a word of goodbye, it hums. The "mhmmm" above the title is the sound of someone clearing their throat, or agreeing with themselves, and it suggests that what follows is a thought half-spoken rather than a speech. The title, "Goodbye", then makes a promise the poem keeps only in its final line.
The poem is about the long aftermath of a relationship. The "forever" in line seven suggests a romantic one, though the poem never says so. Its central idea is that healing is neither erasure nor bitterness. The speaker can feel real gratitude for the past and still hope, firmly, never to see this person again. Those two feelings sit side by side without cancelling each other out.
The language is notably plain, and the plainness does the work. "Now the days have come" sounds like the start of something dramatic, but what has arrived is only that the speaker thinks of the other person "momentarily". The word means both "for a moment" and "at moments", and either way it is small. The speaker then refuses to overclaim: "i wont say you have been completely erase from my time span or long term memory." The phrases "time span" and "long term memory" sound clinical, almost like a psychology textbook, as if the speaker were keeping the feeling at arm's length by describing it in cold vocabulary. The careful "wont say" and "completely" show someone who is honest about not being fully over it, and who doesn't pretend to a tidy victory.
The imagery is thin but effective. Happy moments "replays", as if memory were a recording that starts itself. The speaker doesn't summon these scenes, they simply arrive, and only the happy ones are mentioned. The gratitude is then expressed in the same unpolished way: "you were able to share those ones with me." "Those ones" is awkward and specific, like pointing at items on a shelf, and "able to share" quietly hints that the other person's capacity to give was limited.
The strongest line is "to our forever that never happened." It begins with "to", so it can be read as a toast, with the speaker raising a glass to a future that didn't arrive. "Forever" is turned into a thing the two people owned ("our forever") and then cancelled with "never happened". The poem's only real rhyme sits inside this line: *forever* and *never*. The word that promises everything contains the word that takes it away. "Never" comes back in the last line, so the poem's sound tells the story of the relationship.
That ending is carefully timed. "i hope the days to come" ends the line on a pause, and it echoes the opening "the days have come". For a moment we expect something hopeful, perhaps that the days ahead will be kind. The next line reverses this: "we'll never meet again." The hope is a wish for distance, not for reunion. It could be read as coldness, but after the gratitude it reads more like self-protection. A meeting might disturb the happy replays and the fragile peace of the "momentarily".
The form supports this. There is one block of nine lines, no rhyme scheme beyond that internal echo, no capital letters on "i", and no punctuation except the apostrophes. The poem has no full stops, and the feeling never quite finishes either. The long middle lines ramble the way speech does when someone is thinking aloud, and the later lines shorten ("and i'm grateful", "we'll never meet again") as the speaker settles on a decision. The grammar slips ("erase", "replays", the missing "in" before "the days to come") make it sound unedited, like a message written honestly rather than a performance. The repeated *m* sounds in "mhmmm", "momentarily", "memory", "moments" and "me" also keep the opening hum running underneath.
The poem matters because it avoids the usual shapes of a breakup poem. It has no rage, no begging and no neat forgiveness. It describes a more ordinary and more believable stage: remembering warmly, feeling thankful, and still saying goodbye for good. For a young reader, its lesson is that mixed feelings can be honest and that closing a door doesn't mean you have to hate what was behind it.