The Decision

By Brian Connelly

“What am I doing?” he thought to himself as he peered aimlessly out of the bus window.

The bus rattled its way across the dusty road, crawling across miles and miles of desert.  He wondered, at times, whether the bus had taken a wrong turn and, rather than inform everyone and backtrack, decided to take the scenic route instead. He wouldn’t have minded in the least.

“Maybe this is a mistake.”

He sighed and looked down at the envelopes sitting on his lap, seals long before broken. He had lost count of how many times he took them from his backpack and returned them.  He removed a letter from one of them and flipped it open, not reading it this time, but instead taking it in: the small creases on the corners, the slight but now dimming sparkle from the flamingo-colored ink, the tiny doodles in the margins.  He imagined her sitting, perhaps on her bed, or at a desk littered with knickknacks she couldn’t let go of. He pictured her grinning as she came up with another little idea for her letter to make it more endearing to him.  He found himself grinning a bit, too, thinking of it.

“Maybe it’s not.”

The bus went over what might have been a mound of unusually large dirt on the road, or maybe the carcass of a dead animal. The interruption bumped his head against the hard edge of the bus, shaking him out of his stupor. Most people took planes these days, but he preferred busses, more so now than before. Plane rides ended all too quickly, and all you had was miles upon miles of listless clouds to look at the entire way. Then you landed in a stale and lifeless airport, surrounded by metal, and were ejected into consumerist comfort, Starbucks waiting for you to spend your hard-earned money on a Venti Pumpkin Spice Latte.

Busses, however, took their sweet time, even getting lost a time or two, showing you patches of grass or ferns here or there, maybe a cactus as well.  You might even catch a coyote sneaking around, looking for a jackrabbit or two.  And then there was the beauty of the weather-beaten mountains with their flat tops defiant against the sun, smooth dunes with sand skating over them this way and that, and the occasional canyon, deep as the history of the earth itself.  He sometimes felt that he wished more busses got lost so he could ride on the bus forever, looking out into oblivion, with only the jangling of the rickety vehicle to remind you of the here and now.

He looked at his watch.  It was only 10 minutes until his destination.  It was amazing how so little had actually happened and yet how quickly the time had been wrenched away.  He could see the outskirts of the town where she lived. It was a town with a population so small you would know everyone’s faces inside of a month, and everyone’s names not long after that. How tiny it looked from this far away, juxtaposed against the vast mountain ranges and endless stretches of swirling desert sand.

“This will be it,” he mused to himself.  “No more bus rides for me after this.  This is where I lay my roots forever.”

The bus continued to roll towards its destination, contorting left and right against the ragged road. The station loomed larger and larger.  The Greyhound sign grew taller and taller as the shapes of the surrounding buildings came closer.  It was hard to tell what these buildings were in these small towns. Possibly a police station, maybe a cafe or diner or a hair salon. They all kind of looked the same.

As he approached his destination, he thought to himself about that mysterious and alluring girl he met at the concert in Sacramento. He thought about her naive charm and unabashed warmth.  She wasn’t like any others he met in the city, whose soft skin hardened into armor and ophidian lashes into daggers before they were old enough to legally drink.  City girls whose eyes betrayed a sophisticated cunning under the poorly held pretense that they were playing “hard to get”.

“What is she doing here?” he remembered thinking and feeling compelled to discover the answer.  He remembered how easy it was to walk up to her, and how they just talked.  That had never happened before.  With other girls he met, it seemed like he was immediately on trial, and every encounter ended with the maws of a tiger or their bedroom.  But not with this one.  With this one, it was like staring into space.  There was so much to take in every moment and yet, so much more left to explore.

The sun rose and they found themselves lying on the soft grass outside, cooled by the night air, only arm’s length from each other.  She smiled at him as if waiting, expecting, and he knew he had to consummate this night. But how? He had never had an experience like this.  He leaned over tentatively and offered a single kiss.

Her smile displayed her simple satisfaction.

“Uh oh,” she breathed, looking at her watch. “I have to catch my bus…” she looked over at him and started to stand up.

“Wait!” he pleaded.  “Just… How can I stay in touch?”

She grinned and pulled his hand towards hers. She took out a pen she had in her back pocket and wrote an address on the palm of his hand.  “Don’t lose it.”

He smiled and watched her jog off, looking back once or twice.  He watched as her figure became smaller and smaller in the distance.

Until it was gone.

They wrote letters back and forth for a little over a year.  He had a shoebox full of correspondence (and stickers and polaroids, not to mention a couple of mixtapes).  Finally, on one fateful late-night phone conversation, he made a pledge.

“I’m doing it,” he declared.  “I’m going to California.”

“All the way from North Carolina?” she asked.  “But why?”

“Well, why not?  What’s stopping me?” His brow furrowed.  Her response was not what he was expecting.  “We can’t just keep sending letters and calling, right?  I mean, what’s the next step supposed to be?”

He could visualize her looking down.  Her voice was limp.  “I don’t know.  I guess I never thought about it.  I’m just surprised, that’s all.”  The silence crawled forward in what seemed an eternity.  “I’m glad, of course!” she offered. The words seemed to squeeze their way out of her mouth.

Somehow that was enough.  He bought the tickets as soon as he could and hopped on a 10:53 pm bus with just a backpack and his wallet.

And now here he was.  The bus came to a slow halt.  The station name was announced and the doors whined open. Everyone else on the bus was immobile, sleeping or waiting for the next stop.

He looked at the handful of letters in his backpack.  He thought about the late-night conversations, the angelic giggles, and the imagined caresses. He remembered his fantasies of them sharing a room, seeing each other day in and day out, more talks until dawn.

Then he shifted his gaze towards the infinite skyline tucked behind streams of mountains, the sun now crimson as it rose to the empyrean.

The bus door slowly creaked shut again and the bus lurched forward. In the end, he knew, he had made the right decision.

Brian Connelly is a 44-year-old higher education professional living in Austin, TX with his wife and two children.  He recently got back into writing after a 20-year hiatus.  He loves stories that allow the reader to determine for themselves what really happened at the end.