While You Wander Your Starry Sea, Remember, Remember Me...

Dear Juliet

I hope you're not finding all the Star Trek analogies a little confusing, but I really can't come across anything better. Even the title's taken from Gene Roddenberry's lyrics for the theme...

Anyway, the statistical reads of the blog lined up very neatly last night (contact with the city on the edge of forever) and my subconscious gaily announced this morning that I'd got my nice new metaphorical Enterprise back after the last one got blown up.

I don't know where to take her yet, but at least I'm back in the centre seat.

And I understand, or at least I think I understand, that you're relearning a few things like Spock did at the start of Star Trek IV.

That I did not forget you.

That I did come back for you.

That you always meant everything to me.

And I like you just the way you are.

I suppose you're going through a lot of change and readjustment. Quite a bit of uncertainty and a soupcon of insecurity, perhaps. Wondering if James is the same as he always was or whether he's planning global domination from his private island (not Catalina)?

No, I'm not planning global domination although I would have liked the island, and the nearest I got to it was Point Lobos. Not once but twice. I also took myself off there in September 2023, got a room at the Hyatt Carmel Highlands with a view of the Pacific (once in a lifetime!) and arrived there on the fourth. All was perfect, the only oddity being that the resort was cashless. I was beginning to think that there was something wrong with an America where you couldn't walk into a bar, put down a pair of greenbacks and get a bottle of Bud, but que sera, sera...

However, the Carmel Highlands Store was just up the road past Brad Pitt's other home, so I loped up there, got a pastrami on rye sandwich and a bottle of chocolate milk, found a petrified log to sit on, had a quiet snack supper just south of the Point by the side of California Highway One (there were roadworks thirty-eight k's south) and realised without any fanfare that this was the best birthday I'd had in years. Pity it was my fifty-ninth, not my sixtieth. I rectified that by doing a replay the next year and spent the next day back on Drusilla's beach.

All of which sounds a little smug and self-satisfied, but I wasn't completely content because you weren't around. I thought about you all the time and I never forgot you. I'm just good at coping on my own, but I think you'd have liked the beach. I even brought a biggish stone from it all the way back.

I guess this excerpt from that old poem gets how it felt, and it's still true.

Then there is the coast, and sunset’s boulevard.                                                                                                                             He passes by late on, leaving for that final flight.

 She is not there now. He knew she could not be.                                                                                                                     There are no words, with which to make soliloquy.

 Best leave it to a single sentence then, fading by the long road’s side:

 “I said I would not miss you,                                                                                                                                                      And I lied.”

Love

James