false start

There I was, dreaming about summer.

Single digit weather, sigh...

Grey skies. Bitter wind. Rain. Drip.

Side-stepping snails, sidewalk. Shiver.

Milky tea. Red wine. F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Second-hand copy of Bits of Paradise.

Beautifully flawed characters. Sparkling (dis)illusions.

Love. Money. Class. Youth. Empty dreams.

Timeless, universal. Echoes.

For just the fraction of a second – not long enough for him to be sure it had happened at all, but just enough so that he would be reminded, however faintly, of that night on the Mississippi boulevard – she looked into his eyes.

- The Popular Girl (1922) by F. Scott Fitzgerald - 

..... 

He was thanking the deep low horns for singing in the breeze, the sea for its warm murmurous complaint against the bow, the milk of the stars for washing over them until he felt buoyed up in a substance more taut than air. 

- Love in the Night (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald -

.....

The Mississippi river came carelessly down through the pine forests and phlegmatic villages of Minnesota to the city of New Heidelberg, for the express purpose of dividing the ladies... of the town from their laundresses...

- Our Own Movie Queen (1925) by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald -

Again their lips sought each other, and blue and silver seemed to soar like rockets above them, burst and shower down about their shoulders in protective atoms of color, screening them from time, from sight.

- A Penny Spent (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald -

.....

All my life I have had a rather curious horror of small towns... oppressed with the consciousness that there was a whole hidden life, a whole series of secret implications, significances and terrors... of which I knew nothing.

- The Dance (1926) by F. Scott Fitzgerald -

.....

Her face, the face of a saint, an intense little Madonna, was lifted fragilely out of the mortal dust of the afternoon... he had never seen a texture pale and immaculate as her skin, lustrous and garish as her eyes.

- Jacob's Ladder (1927) by F. Scott Fitzgerald -