“Tonight I want to come to you because I have a heavy heart and everything seems difficult to live with. I did a little work this morning, not at all this afternoon. It’s like I forgot my energy and what I have to do. There are hours, days, weeks like this where it looks like everything is dying in your hands. You know that too. I have known for a long time that these hours when I want to turn away from everything are the most dangerous – the times when I want to run away and live away from anything that could help me. It is because I know this that I come to you. If you were here, everything would be easier. But tonight I know for sure you won’t come.
I feel like I’ve been losing everything for a while. If you walked away from me, it would be quite dark. In the meantime, I have no hope of seeing you again for a long time. Tonight I wonder what you’re doing, where you are and what you’re imagining. I wish I had the certainty of your thought and love. I have it sometimes. But what love can we always be sure of. One gesture and everything can be destroyed, at least for a while. After all, all it takes is one person who smiles at you and pleases you and, for at least a week, there is no love left in that heart of which I am so jealous.
What can we do about it but to admit and understand and be patient. And what am I myself to demand so much from a being. But perhaps it is because I know all the weaknesses that even a strong heart can have that I have so many apprehensions about absence and about this stupid separation where you have to feed a love of flesh with shadows and memories. Everyone else is in bed. I’m staying with you, but I feel like a dry soul like any desert. Oh ! My dear, when the gushing comes back and the scream! I feel so left, so clumsy, with this kind of unused love that remains on my chest and oppresses me without giving me joy. I feel like I’m no good at anything anymore.
I should be inhabited by what I write, full of that novel and those characters I entered again. But I look at them from the outside, I work distractedly, with my intelligence, and not for a single moment with that passion and violence that I have always brought to what I love. I’m stopping this all of a sudden. I realize it’s a letter of lamentation. And you and I have more to do than lament. When you feel your heart’s dry, it’s best to keep your mouth shut. You’re the only person today I want to write things like that to. But that’s no reason. It’s not a bad thing, either.
Until now, you’ve loved the best in me. Maybe it’s not love yet. And maybe you won’t really love me until you love me with my weaknesses and flaws. But when and how soon? It is a beautiful and terrible thing to have to love yourself also in danger, in uncertainty, in the middle of a world that is crumbling and of a story where a man’s life weighs so little. I will not rest until your face is taken from me. If you do not come, I will wait, but I will wait in distress and in the dryness of heart. Hello, black and white.
Do your best to stay close to me and forget about so many demands and bad moods. Life isn’t easy for me right now. I have reasons not to be gay. But if your God exists, he knows that I will give all that I am and all that I have to have your hand on my face again. I have not stopped loving you and waiting for you - even in the middle of the desert. Don’t forget me.”
— Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, Correspondance, July 7, 1944 [#9]
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