I’m sitting in my bedroom on the floor, on the carpet, leaning against the bed, opposite the open window, facing the rosebushes, the pansies, the sweet peas, looking at the sky. There’s no one here and everything is lovely and calm. I have a heavy heart. Since I left you yesterday, I’ve been holding a gloomy and strange debate…with…I don’t know what, something new that got into me a while ago and suddenly became tangible the day before yesterday in Cannes. I think it’s fear, the dreadful fear of being apart. I get the sense that you’re closer and closer to giving up, to defeat, and this idea is driving me absolutely mad. I know that if one day you falter and stop fighting to hold on to me, I’ll leave. I know it. I know myself, and in a certain way I’m wise enough to know that the struggle can’t lead us anywhere. So I’ll leave, and for the moment I keep thinking that it wouldn’t take much for that catastrophic moment to arrive. I was still holding on to a vague hope that in an extreme situation, you’d choose me; I learned that I was mistaken, so all it would take is for that situation to come about. If we get to that point, it would be a debacle for me—death itself. I try to shake myself out of it, to hold back, to defend myself, to cling to anything at all to avoid the abyss. Ah, if only you could understand the depths of my stubbornness, my energy, my desire to justify my existence without you, my regret, the nostalgia I have for my taste for life! If only you knew how I’m trying to hold on, how I’m resorting to everything I can! No! Oh, no! I don’t want to die either. But I get no answer to my efforts—nothing satisfies me even a little, not even for a second! I tell myself—ah, if only you knew everything I tell myself. I tell myself that I have a place that no one can fill but me, and that this is the sole reason I exist and act. When the sun strikes me, I look at the shadow that appears beneath me, that only exists for me, that unique shadow that I form on the stone, and I’m moved just standing above it, as though I were looking at a child.
Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Mon Cher Amour, May 14, 1950 [#304]
