Letter LXXVIII

To-night, Beloved, the burden of things is too much for me.
Come to me somehow, dear ghost of all my happiness, and take me in your
arms! I ache and ache, not to belong to you. I do: I must. It is only
our senses that divide us; and mine are all famished servants waiting
for their master. They have nothing to do but watch for you, and pretend
that they believe you will come. Oh, it is grievous!

Beloved, in the darkness do you feel my kisses? They go out of me in
sharp stabs of pain: they must go somewhere for me to be delivered of
them only with so much suffering. Oh, how this should make me hate you,
if that were possible: how, instead, I love you more and more, and
shall, dearest, and will till I die!

I will die, because in no other way can I express how much I love you.
I am possessed by all the despairing words about lost happiness that the
poets have written. They go through me like ghosts: I am haunted by
them: but they are bloodless things. It seems when I listen to all the
other desolate voices that have ever cried, that I alone have blood in
me. Nobody ever loved as I love since the world began.

There, dearest, take this, all this bitter wine of me poured out until I
feel in myself only the dregs left: and still in them is the fire and
the suffering.