LETTER LXV.
My Dear: I dream of you now every night, and you are always kind, always just as I knew you: the same without a shadow of change.
I cannot picture you anyhow else, though my life is full of the silence you have made. My heart seems to have stopped on the last beat the sight of your handwriting gave it.
I dare not bid you come back now: sorrow has made me a stranger to myself. I could not look at you and say "I am your Star":—I could not believe it if I said it. Two women have inhabited me, and the one here now is not the one you knew and loved: their one likeness is that they both have loved the same man, the one certain that her love was returned, and the other certain of nothing. What a world of difference lies in that!
I lay hands on myself, half doubting, and feel my skeleton pushing to the front: my glass shows it me. Thus we are all built up: bones are at the foundations of our happiness, and when the happiness wears thin, they show through, the true architecture of humanity.
I have to realize now that I have become the greatest possible failure in life,—a woman who has lost her "share of the world": I try to shape myself to it.
It is deadly when a woman's sex, what was once her glory, reveals itself to her as an all-containing loss. I realized myself fully only when I was with you; and now I can't undo it.—You gone, I lean against a shadow, and feel myself forever falling, drifting to no end, a Francesca without a Paolo. Well, it must be some comfort that I do not drag you with me. I never believed myself a "strong" woman; your lightest wish shaped me to its liking. Now you have molded me with your own image and superscription, and have cast me away.
Are not the die and the coin that comes from it only two sides of the same form?—there is not a hair's breadth anywhere between their surfaces where they lie, the one inclosing the other. Yet part them, and the light strikes on them how differently! That is a mere condition of light: join them in darkness, where the light cannot strike, and they are the same—two faces of a single form. So you and I, dear, when we are dead, shall come together again, I trust. Or are we to come back to each other defaced and warped out of our true conjunction? I think not: for if you have changed, if soul can ever change, I shall be melted again by your touch, and flow to meet all the change that is in you, since my true self is to be you.
Oh, you, my Beloved, do you wake happy, either with or without thoughts of me? I cannot understand, but I trust that it may be so. If I could have a reason why I have so passed out of your life, I could endure it better. What was in me that you did not wish? What was in you that I must not wish for evermore? If the root of this separation was in you, if in God's will it was ordered that we were to love, and, without loving less, afterwards be parted, I could acquiesce so willingly. But it is this knowing nothing that overwhelms me:—I strain my eyes for sight and can't see; I reach out my hands for the sunlight and am given great handfuls of darkness. I said to you the sun had dropped out of my heaven.—My dear, my dear, is this darkness indeed you? Am I in the mold with my face to yours, receiving the close impression of a misery in which we are at one? Are you, dearest, hungering and thirsting for me, as I now for you?
I wonder what, to the starving and drought-stricken, the taste of death can be like! Do all the rivers of the world run together to the lips then, and all its fruits strike suddenly to the taste when the long deprivation ceases to be a want? Or is it simply a ceasing of hunger and thirst—an antidote to it all?