Who I had been before you
floats in front of me like a faded Polaroid,
blurry and washed out in a pale yellow light.
The vague traces of a smile linger on a serene face
that I no longer recognize.
What am I now?
(I sit here night after night
counting up all the things I’m not
like a peasant taking inventory
on a failed crop.)
What am I for?
This I know: I am for others to use.
Good for one application
and then to be tossed—
carelessly out the window of a speeding vehicle.
I am for the between times;
I am the shepherd, the ferryman.
I am not the destination,
erase me from your memory.
Ever since Sam came back to Spain, he's been working nonstop. As much as he wanted to respond to Quinn's letter, he knew he wouldn't have enough time to write the detailed letter she was expecting to receive. Today he had more time than usual, so he wrote a letter back to her as quickly as he could. The paper was slightly crumpled and his handwriting was a little more sloppy than usual.
I’m sorry it took so long for me to respond. And sorry about the sloppiness. I don't have much time, so I'm writing this as fast as I can.It’s been… kind of crazy over here. I don’t mean that to worry you, though. I mean it’s just really busy. This is the first time I’ve gotten much free time since I came back here. I can’t tell you how happy I was to get your letter. A few days back in Spain and I already received a letter. Your letters always cheer me up.
So, I guess I should start out by saying that I’m okay. I can’t tell you what’s going on or anything like that, but I can tell you that I’m safe. I really missed the guys. I told them all about the wedding and our honeymoon (but I left out our sex stories, don’t worry). I told them about the pregnancy, too. They were happy for us. They made a lot of jokes about how we ‘don’t waste any time.’ A lot of them have kids so they know what we’re going through. I talk to this guy here named Steve a lot. He has two daughters. One is 4 years old and the other is a year. He keeps telling me what to expect and what it’s like. It’s really helping. He keeps saying is that there’s no better feeling than being a dad, which makes me even more excited for our kid.
Anyway, are you enrolled at Princeton now? In your last letter you mentioned that you were going to be moving at the end of the week. Don’t worry about going through my stuff, by the way. I’m sure you already have by now, but don’t feel bad about it. I don’t have anything to hide from you. I don’t have anything special hidden (that I can remember), so feel free to completely tear my room apart. What’s the apartment like? Is it as good as it looked in the pictures? I can’t wait to see it.
Sometimes I forget I’m without you, too. You know when I’m half awake and half asleep during the middle of the night, and I grab your waist and hold you close to me? The first night I got here when I was lying in bed, I turned on my side and reached out for you like that. My arm just grabbed onto air. I woke up after that and couldn’t fall back asleep. All I could think about was you after that. I was so tired the next day, and I had to blame it on time zones because ‘I miss my wife’ isn’t a valid reason. I did that for the first three nights, actually. It was a habit. It took me a while to shake it. I miss you so much, Quinn. I can’t wait to be there with you, to actually hold you, and to be there for our child. Don’t listen to your friends, by the way. We can take care of this baby, and we will. Our age doesn’t matter. We were going to have one eventually, right? I guess now’s the right time. They just don’t know what true love is. When you really love someone you make a family with them. Or maybe they really underestimate me. I’m going to take care of both of you and our baby. I promise.
I love it when you ramble, Quinn. So don’t stop. It’s not nonsense. Your rambling sort of distracts me from what’s going on around here. Like I get lost in your words or something. I can’t really explain it. But anyway, I can’t wait to see the bump! I bet it’s bigger since I’ve left, right? I think the thing I’m most excited about our pregnancy is the fact that I’m gonna see your stomach grow, y’know? Well, I’m going to see it in pictures… It’s still good enough for me.
I have to wrap this up now. I love you, Quinn. You are my world.
Love your husband,
Sam Evans.
p.s. By the way, thank you for everything in my care package. I showed the guys the wedding pictures and the ultrasound. The ultrasound is my favorite.
On the 14th October four years ago, that's when I met you.
I was a friends birthday party in the perfect 5th and for some reason an argument kicked off so I went outside with them to try and cool things down. Instead I ended up crying. I didn't know you at the time, I knew of you through like Bebo hah :') but you were friends with Stu, back then he was a guy I knew from a while ago. Anyway, I was upset and needed a friendly face so I when I noticed Stu was with a group of people just outside Clarks I went to say hello to him. And thats when I met you, I saw you properly for the first time. You tried to cheer me up, you even gave me your jumper 'cause I was freezing. Then when it was time to go home we went our separate ways and I thought that was it. I thought you were just gunna be that really cute popular guy that was nice to me once. But nope, when I got home you had added me on facebook and we planned to meet the next day. I won't go into that because I could literally type for ever!
All I really want to say to you is that you're amazing. You always were and you still are. When people ask about you, then often ask me why the hell we broke up and honestly, All I say is that 'I think we were just too good together' hah that probably doesn't even make sense. But to this day I love you and your family to bits. As I stated in the 'Letter to your sister' post hah I do miss you and I fell awful when I tell you I can't meet you because I am busy or something because I totally love spending time with you - You're one of the bestest friends I could ever ask for now and I wouldn't change a thing.
Wow, that turned out to be a little longer than expected.
Much time has passed since I received your last letter. Please don’t hold that against me; first it was work, then a number of interruptions, and finally poor health that again and again kept me from answering, because I wanted my answer to come to you out of peaceful and happy days. Now I feel somewhat better again (the beginning of spring with its moody, bad-tempered transitions was hard to bear here too) and once again, dear Mr. Kappus, I can greet you and talk to you (which I do with real pleasure) about this and that in response to your letter, as well as I can.
You see: I have copied out your sonnet, because I found that it is lovely and simple and born in the shape that it moves in with such quiet decorum. It is the best poem of yours that you have let me read. And now I am giving you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one’s own in someone else’s handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and in your innermost self you will feel how much they are yours. —
It was a pleasure for me to read this sonnet and your letter several times; I thank you for both.
And don't let yourself be led astray in your solitude merely because something within you wishes to break away from it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything, in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But this period of learning is always long and self-contained, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are life-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.
It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer. But how can they, who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?
They act out of mutual helplessness, and then if, with the best of intentions, they try to escape the convention that is approaching them (marriage, for example), they fall into the clutches of some less obvious but just as deadly conventional solution. For then everything around them is convention. Wherever people act out of a prematurely fused, muddy communion, every action is conventional: every relation that such confusion leads to has its own convention, how ever unusual (i.e., in the ordinary sense immoral) it may be; even separating would be a conventional step, an impersonal, accidental decision without strength and without fruit.
Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand, on without opening, there is no general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.
We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes that time has brought about there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.
The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately , more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.
This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
And one more thing: Don’t think that the great love which was once granted to you, when you were a boy, has been lost; how can you know whether vast and generous wishes didn’t ripen in you at that time, and purposes by which you are still living today? I believe that that love remains so strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life —
All good wishes to you, dear Mr. Kappus!
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
---
This is my favourite letter in the small collection. I've already posted a quotation from this collection some time ago. Italicized is one of my favourite quotations, ever. Though, I'm not sure I fully agree with the line that follows said quotation. Nevertheless, since I first picked it up, I have read Letters to a Young Poet at least once a year and am always inspired afterwards.
Lately I've been reading a lot of writers' letters and journal entries. Steinbeck. Plath. Woolf. Austen.
On countless occasions I've jokingly (to an extent) told people I'd rather they send me a message written on a dirty napkin than send me a string of texts.
Pen and paper, or even lipstick and napkin, will almost always be cherished more than electronic means of communication. While texts/emails are convenient and speedy, they can often pale in comparison to a letter's sincere thought, caused by the absence of such supposed luxuries.
Though do not get me wrong, I have a collection of texts and emails that I treasure as well.
And on that note...send me your messages scrawled on dirty napkins! ;)
Well, this is gonna be a hard one :( It's been years since you broke my heart, but it still comes to my mind, a lot. I'd never met a boy like you, and I don't think I ever will again. You were smart, funny, PERFECT, and I just "knew" we were gonna be together someday. Sometimes, I still feel like we'll meet again and it'll be different. But, obviously, it wasn't meant to be.
The way you treated me when she, my best friend, tried to break us apart, it was awful. I've never lost so much sleep or cried that much. I didn't deserve that, and I don't know why you would turn on me after everything we had been through.
But the past is the past, right? We don't speak, at least not often, we don't live close by, and I don't think you ever even knew how much you hurt me, after all this time xD
Even though getting over you felt like losing my soul, I do want to say thank you. Despite everything, you gave me one of the best years of my life. Seeing you everyday never got old, and we just clicked so well that it was impossible for us not to fall for each other. You were the best friend I ever had :) I won't forget all the great times we had, and you'll always be special to me, even if I don't say it (;
But young people err so often and so grievously in this: that they (in whose nature it lies to have no patience) fling themselves at each other, when love takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion ...
To put it quite frankly, you honestly made my night tonight. I was convinced that, after last night, you wouldn't hit me up for a few days so I took the initiative and spoke to you first and I'm glad I did. You were taking forever at first and I was ready to give up on having our talk, but then you came through. I'm really glad that everything - I hope - is out in the open, finally. I feel like this is a new step/page for us. I'm just ready to see where we go from here. Anyway, I'm really happy that we're working on things. Like I said, you're too much of a good thing in my life to let go. Whatever you end up being to me, I'll take it... as long as it's positive.
