“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.”

— Michael Bishop , book No Enemy But Time

Source: No Enemy But Time (1982), Chapter 30 “Marakoi, Zarakal” (p. 315; closing words)

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Michael Bishop 25

American writer 1945

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