Dear _______,
I once heard the question: what if the most passionate love affair you will ever have lasts just thirty seconds? That person on the train you can’t stop staring at, and the stare seems reciprocal. You’ve had that, right? Then they get off at some station and you never see them again. A cliché for a reason. There are overgrown tracks to nowhere, offshoots stitched in by bramble, barely visible because their rust is the same dull orange as the hibernal flora. Every ride, I mourn those mountains across the river: all the times I never hiked them, all the times I never will. Not enough time. Only one life. What if my insides are actually this (the view out the window, the changing constant, the reason I write from this seat every time I come home, the reason I write)?
Dear _______,
Ice on the river fractures when it’s not cold enough to stay whole. A sign propped up on a house west of the tracks says “no wake zone,” and I fear my parents’ deaths more than my own. To not be a child; to always be a child—I’m not sure which is worse. I can’t even see the other shore: snow clouds fill the span, gulls pierce the gray and the train is now stopped completely, stuck between stations. I don’t recall this happening, ever. Things were once entirely predictable; that’s not true, of course. We’re waiting for a northbound train to pass, we’re told. Broken floes tilt out from the water, lean on riparian boulders, expose their inside blues.
Dear _______,
When I was home for the wedding last June, I only wrote northbound, since on the way back to the city I was married and in a sedan. I was giddy and I felt nothing. I mean, I didn’t even wish I were on the train. Something old, something new, something familiar, something repeated and turned. Something turned over. And just now, when I missed Bannerman Castle because I was on my phone, I was okay; no scarcity. That’s the difference between way back and now: peace to let trees dissolve into periwinkle without my seeing them. I’m in the eyes of the leaves, even if I’m not here. I made a vow to perpetually revise my marriage, and if this window’s shown me anything, it’s that I’m capable of re-vision. (Thank you again for your weird poem-toast, by the way—I’ll remember the puzzled look on my aunt’s face forever.)
Dear _______,
We pass the two limited-service stations meant for hikers, as opposed to commuters. The first is Breakneck Ridge, not as dangerous as it sounds—though for at least one person it must have been. The next is Manitou, Lenape name for the Great Spirit who lives in this valley’s rocks, copses, and kills (i.e., “streams” in Dutch). Names continue to run in place without anyone asking why. Do you think it’s possible to live this life as only a ripple in stagnant water, skimming menisci like a waterfowl?
Dear _______,
The trails up the sides of Dunderberg Mountain fill faster with snow than the forested parts. The wild disorder of trackside trees is plainest when their branches are bare. The station name Cold Spring sounds like my every aspiration: to tap the source, to coax the insides out. Less than an hour south of where I started, the river is ice-free. Cold accrues in the slender channels islands make between river and mainland, but the Hudson itself runs clear. Even the spring descending the western escarpment flows freely, no sign of freezing. Cold springs emerge from cracks in the stone, and we simply accept their running: we hold out our hands to catch them when we’re thirsty, as if they belong to us.
Dear _______,
After Cortlandt the river spreads wide, propping open the door to everything I know. Power lines on the opposite shore where the forest was sheared away. What is home but a series of faces, or a single face that keeps shifting? As if the river had ever worked to hold your aims or image still. This is the material: my hands as channels, eddies, openings; tunnels as what can never be said. My younger selves crowd the car, ridges meeting each other and crossing. I came with nothing. I’m leaving with a level expanse, ever-brightening at its edges: the opposite of dusk.
Dear _______,
I want to learn to read the reeds, to know that gulls appearing to walk on water are, in fact, standing on shoals. To learn the words for all the waterways too small for proper names. As we near the city these ways diminish or, rather, lose visibility to the human eye. Flurries reappear. Things feel oceanic as saltwater creeps up from New York Harbor. The Palisades’ talus descends. Now rain—rather, sleet—ricochets up from the ground, and geese lift off at acute angles. If the practice was concentration, I have deviated from the practice. If the practice was awareness, I have become aware of my deviation, of everything I’ve failed to see. I always look up a moment too late, though I’ve learned the straight-on view is not always the best. Now—underground beneath Midtown—I prepare to give up agency. I become stream. “Folks, if you’ve been counting down along with us, you’ve come to the same conclusion: Grand Central Terminal, next and final stop.”
Write soon, whatever that means to you.
Love,
S
P.S. I believe in you, too.
Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Comfort (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022, finalist for the National Poetry Series) and Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013, winner of the Michael Rubin Book Award). Her latest project, “The Hudson Lines,” was a semifinalist for Tupelo Press’ 2025 Helena Whitehill Award and received an honorable mention for Green Linden Press’ 2025 Wishing Jewel Prize. Sarah’s writing has appeared in such journals as Fence, Jewish Currents, Chartreuse, Speculative Nonfiction, Contra Viento, Ghost Proposal, and OmniVerse. She is the recipient of residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, In Cahoots, Bethany Arts Community, and Art Farm. Raised in the Hudson River Valley of New York State, she now lives in San Francisco.