The Cheyenne Detour
From The Nomad Chronicle
The bus ticket to Seattle wasn't a straight shot. It had a deliberate, hopeful detour plotted in my head, a side quest to Cheyenne, Wyoming. The logic was as flimsy as a road map in the rain, built on the memory of a summer fling from '91. Her name was Melissa, and we'd collided for a few perfect, sun-drenched days at a music festival in northern Michigan. We were all sweat, cheap beer, cannabis-fueled sex, and the shared thrill of a guitar riff hitting at the exact right moment. We’d swapped addresses, promising to write letters, and kept in touch. The idea of her, this fleeting connection, was a powerful talisman against the loneliness of the road. I'd sent her a postcard: "Passing through Cheyenne on my way west. Be at the bus station."
And she was. Standing there under the sickly yellow light of the Greyhound station, she looked just as beautifully out of place as I felt. What was supposed to be a few hours of layover bled into a week. We found a roadside motel that felt like it had been coughed up by the highway—a squat, brick rectangle with a flickering neon sign that hummed a desperate, lonely tune all night. That room became our entire world, a temporary pocket of existence sealed off from the vast, indifferent Wyoming sky. We were two ships passing in the night who had decided to drop anchor for a few days.
Our lives ran on the schedule of the 24-hour truck stop diner across the asphalt. We’d slide into a cracked vinyl booth, the air thick with the smell of burnt coffee and diesel fumes, and talk for hours. We were both running—me toward the sound of Seattle, her to somewhere in Colorado. We were kids playing at being adults, just as we had in that tent, only now the game felt more real and the stakes higher. We weren't planning a future; we were unpacking the baggage of our pasts, our shared sense of displacement a temporary glue. The drone of the highway outside was a constant reminder that this was all borrowed time.
The week was a fever dream of cheap coffee, whisky, sweat-soaked sheets, mushroom-fueled multiorgasmic sex, conversations that lasted until dawn, and the profound comfort of not being alone. But we both knew it was an interlude, not the main story. The pull of Seattle, the melodic despair I was chasing, was still a physical need. It was an obsession that no amount of human connection could quiet. When the week was up, the goodbye wasn't dramatic. It was a quiet, mutual acknowledgment that we were on different trajectories. It was fortuitous, a brief and necessary shelter from the storm of the road. I gave her a hug, shouldered my backpack, and got back on a bus headed to the Emerald City, the memory of our week already starting to feel like another life I had shed along the way. The detour was over. The real journey was about to begin.