You can’t go home again, particularly if you never had one. - Michael Bishop

Time, as it always does, passed.

What motivates you, then? Please don’t tell me altruism. I am not quite so gullible as that.

Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self—the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach—were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose.
“Ciao,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother.