Officially verified word count is 50,391. Title of the novel is "I'm Only Passing Through," and here are the last two paragraphs:
I wasn’t sure what I thought I was doing either but I took that walk around the park and thought about that song and about the girl who had spoken lines from it to me years before they became lines in a song. I no longer ached for her, but the memories could come back at any moment and they could come back strong; and though I no longer ached for her, I sometimes wondered where she was and what had become of her. We had never had our time. I kept hoping to get a card at Christmas or a letter out of nowhere, but it turned out that she really had been only passing through.
As you get older, you can start to understand about a thing like that; but when you are in college, especially when you are new in college, it’s hard to get your head around just how fleeting everything is. This is especially true of time and of friendship. You can’t do anything about time except to stand by idly as it gains momentum and moves a little faster every day. Sometimes there is not much you can do about friendship, because sometimes it is just in our nature to do things that hurt other people, whether we mean to or not. But it does not do to dwell for too long on the past, although it is sometimes necessary to spend a little bit of time in the past to be able to understand it as best you can and to be able to get on with the present. It is just so dangerous to spend even one moment too many on that return to innocence.
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