A boy is not capable of shutting down his mind, his memory the insatiable collector of stories that never happened or didn't turn out right.
Overnight... the clock doesn’t stop.
Writer’s note
The cross-country buses run a 24-hour schedule in a world that's not the one you know. The only thing you can rely on from your old world is the names of places - the destination on your ticket. For this story, Salt Lake City. You've got 24 hours downtown in the capital of Utah.
A 21-year-old guy goes in search of a better ending for his story, an ending that never comes. You can't change a story that's already done but he can't stop thinking about it. Things ended badly with the stranger he met in Salt Lake City and he searches for a way to change the past or find out what exactly happened between the two of them - because it kills him the handsome stranger got away.
Passage at Amazon Salt Lake City Again
The beginning of the story…
I WOULD like to tell you this is my story with a happy ending.
Only it isn't.
So I don't want to set you up for some really nice ending and then it doesn't come off that way.
It's better, then, to put the ending right up front. We can get it out of the way. It won't cause as much trouble when it comes around again at the end of events.
We said goodbye, me and Virgil.
The End.
What should have happened between us never did. And after we said goodbye, that was it. We never talked again or saw one another, or wrote or anything.
I have no idea where he ended up.
We should not have said goodbye like that. One of us should have said something like, "Hey, wait a minute."
Then we could have looked at each other and we would have known, the two of us, what that "wait a minute" was all about.
It would have meant, "We can't say goodbye. There is too much going on here for us to just walk out of each other's life."
We were 21-year-old guys who had known each other for exactly 24 hours.
I don't know what that sounds like. I guess it sounds like love at first sight. Well, why not? If that's what it was, then there you have it.
We were in Utah at the time, Salt Lake City specifically. Neither one of us was from there. Virgil was working there in the summer and I was passing through.
I play it over and over in my mind. I want it to end differently but it never does. It's always that polite goodbye that I didn't want. I couldn't seem to keep it from ending like that.
It would be easy to invent a better ending. For instance, I get this picture of what never happened, of how we start to talk pretty openly. Then we get right past the obstacle of two scared guys falling for each other.
Was Virgil scared like that, too, because he was a guy falling for another guy?
I look for clues over those 24 hours but they are so hard to interpret. They could mean one thing or they could mean another. All I know for sure is how much it bothers me to think that we might have walked away from what we both wanted.
I was afraid. If Virgil was, too, then neither one of us was going to bail the other one out.
Yeah, I'm mad at myself for not speaking up. Maybe I wouldn't have known what to say after, "Hey, wait a minute," but maybe Virgil would have figured it out, something to say or do, anything to keep us going a while longer.
Just because there's a bus leaving town, you don't have to get on it, especially if you have an unlimited travel pass. You can get the next one out if you need to. Or you can stay with Virgil forever.