This is the true and completely non-fictionalized story of how daylight saving caused me to miss my bus home by one minute.

It was a warm night, the heavy cloud from the day’s rain was passing and large holes of clear starry sky were emerging. The night had a light feeling to it, possibly the result of the combination of low cloud and clear starry skies with the city lights.

Our protagonist for this tale, a young boy clad in dual layers of grayscale clothing, stands surrounded by noisy crowds, at once in very fine company and very alone. Time appears to move faster around him, the world carrying on oblivious to his desired observations. On the large screen in front of him plays out a mighty battle between the local stallions and the large western cats from a southern land.

The battle turns in the local’s favour and the boy becomes increasingly detached from reality. All that matters is the battle. All that matters is the win. Heart pounding in his chest and in his head as the clock counts down and then… it is over. They did it. The boy cheers and returns to the world around him.

The protagonist may have been alone in observing the battle, but he himself was in fact under observation. Hiding away from the crowds was a young girl, equally lost in the world and equally as shy to reveal it. As the boy turned from the screen to engage the company around him, the girl made her move.

When the conversation died, and the boy went looking to join another, the girl approached. They greeted each other as stranger acquaintances, as would any meeting persons. But something about this girl’s eyes said more than hello. The boy recognized in her soul the same pain that was in his.

“Come away with me.” She said quietly, a tear appearing in her eye. Where reason told him no, his heart told him yes. The boy picked up his bag and looked at his watch.

The time was 10:40pm, according to the watch. But this boy had a dark secret. A secret that he shared with nobody. Far away was another spirit, a spirit in another time. A ghost? A memory? Who can be sure? Even the boy had mostly forgotten the reason. But his watch remembered. On its face bore not the time of the surrounding world, but the time of a distant land from a tragic past.

It was surely too late to make the last bus home, as the last bus leaves at 9:45pm. This is an unchallenged fact and the boy did not for one moment longer ponder it.

The girl looked back and her gaze asked why he could not leave. But she knew the answer even if he didn’t. His heart was still in the distant land of the future. She left alone.

Returning to the conversation around him, the boy felt deeply entrenched in regret. He looked at his watch again. 10:46pm. But then he realized with a sudden agony, his watch was wrong. The time in the world surrounding him was in fact only 9:46pm! The last bus had left only one minute ago.

Now an interesting fact you may not realized about daylight saving is that the imbalance caused by moving one hour of daylight from the morning to the afternoon actually causes chemical changes in the atmosphere. In fact, the entire air was pure helium. It’s funny not many people know this, but you can’t dispute it: it’s science.

The boy hesitated a moment. Was he really about to achieve the impossible? Could he break free from his past and find happiness with a new spirit? He breathed deep and allowed the helium to saturate his lungs and his blood stream. Now weighing less than the air in the world around him he was able to float to the rooftops and bound effortlessly from one building to another. But he was still not fast enough.

In the distance he could see the girl, fleeing faster, sat atop a charging golden unicorn, unknowing of her pursuer. All it would take was a brief glimpse back and she would see him. Both their lives would find meaning.

But it never happened. Happy endings are the things of fiction, fairy tales. The boy sank back to Earth and walked home, otherwise happy but forever incomplete. The girl did eventually look back but by that time she was already long out of range. They continued to live their lives the way they always had, and the way the world dictates they always will.

The end.

Ok, so what happened was I was watching the football at the pub and because my watch is on daylight saving time it said it was 10:30pm and because the bus leaves at 9:45pm my mind just told me I’d missed the bus, and by the time I realized I had to take off an hour for the time difference it was already 9:45pm local time. So I caught the train home.