An Unposted Love Letter

I usually have a few books around my bed. They feel like guardians. I always feel protected by words. Even though, these days, I feel like I’m constantly tripping over them. Both the books and metaphorically, words.

If I’m reading a novel, I’ll usually read the novel faithfully. Trying to keep intact the world of the book. If the novel is one more of ideas than characters, with a very loose thread kind of narrative, then I usually intersperse it with short stories.

You would think that I read so much on the job, I would refrain from reading altogether. But I can’t help myself. It’s as if the tape rewinds in my head and the tight structure my brain has started coiling itself in starts to unroll – starts to transform into all kinds of brilliant dazzling colours.

I honestly recommend Doris Lessing’s Stories. It’s a collection of short stories that break my heart. I try not to be greedy. Only reading one story a day. Trying to let the flavours linger longer. There was no need for me to. The stories are so strong that they stay there, smiling at me, like old friends, whenever I return for another.

I’m only one-third into the collection. So far, the story that came closest to bringing me to tears was “An Unposted Love Letter”. It’s so wonderful that I don’t dare to even begin to analyse it –I’m just sitting here, being profoundly affected.

I’ll quote it a little, because I can’t help it, even though the words without all the other perfect words of the story does deal it a great injustice:

“I am a great space that enlarges, that grows, that spreads with the steady lightening of the human soul, and in the space, squatting in the corner, is a thing, an object, a dark, slow, coiled, amorphous heaviness, embodied sleep, a cold stupid sleep, a heaviness like the dark in a stale room – this thing stirs in its sleep where it squats in my soul, and I put all my muscles, all my force, into defeating it. For this was what I was born for, this is what I am, to fight embodied sleep, putting around it a confining girdle of light, of intelligence, so that it cannot spread its slow stain of ugliness over the trees, over the stars, over you.
…

I release you to go to your joys without me. I leave you to your love. I leave you to your life.”