Lantern Summer in Seattle...

Dear Juliet

I said to Keith I might go over to Seattle between 22nd March-2nd April 2027. I could drop in on him in Chicago and successfully take the Empire Builder across the top of America to the Emerald City this time.

Honestly, makes me feel like Green Lantern...

What a pity you couldn't just hop the train...

Sorry. Evil thought.

Anyway, it's far from settled. Whatever happens, please be assured that I'll be really sad I can't visit you, will think about you all the time and will take plenty of photographs for you. I'll probably find a layby to cry in, too. Here's a few in the meantime:

Maybe this is where Gatsby's green light might be found, "in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."

Perhaps, as I said in an earlier post, perhaps Gatsby was wrong. Perhaps one fine morning we will no longer be so ceaselessly borne back into the past. Perhaps we will run faster, stretch our arms out further...

Perhaps, one fine morning, I might once again walk across the concourse at Union Station...

"Once all the details had been dealt with there was nothing else to do except take another look around Chicago. In one sense, I was going home. In another sense, I was distancing myself, time zone by time zone, from the place I would rather have been.

I walked across the main concourse of Union Station on the morning of March 30. It was Juliet’s birthday, and I looked at the screens showing departure times of the great Amtrak trains, heading out across America to all points east and west. There was the Southwest Chief, leaving for Los Angeles, and there was I, going in the other direction..."

(Dear Miss Landau)

God, but that broke my heart back in the day. Leaving you and walking away.

But maybe I'd see the impossible girl standing by the silver train on track 29, ticket to ride in hand...

And hear Jo Stafford's song in the spring air...

Tomorrow is another day.

Love,

J.