Arrows and feathers with Jeremiah 31:3 lettering

The 6.42 has gone again without you, and I am writing this on the back of a platform timetable because the waiting room has run out of paper. Mrs Okafor at the buffet has taken to calling me the woman who waits for the wrong train. She means it kindly.

Yesterday I found a feather caught in the ticket barrier, grey and banded like a pigeon's, and I put it in my purse the way you kept that pencil stub from the printers in Leeds. Feathers hold their shape better than anything, Dad used to say, which is why they fletch arrows. Straight flight. Nothing wasted.

I've been thinking about the letters you posted from Carlisle, the ones where you wrote the same line three times in different hands because you couldn't decide which way it should lean. I laughed at you. I still have them. I read the one about the everlasting part again last night while the last engines shunted in the yard, and I decided I would stop pretending I was only passing through.

So I've bought a return for Thursday, platform four, the usual rubbish coffee. If you're not on the 14:10 I'll wait for the next one, and the one after that, until the feathers wear through. Yours in ink and in haste, Ruth.