Beyond the Looking Glass

Beautiful man, eyes of an epistolary castaway,

I have to let you go. And you are entitled to know why. There are many things you don't know about me, partly because I don't let you see them and partly because the time we've spent together has been so short, so short-lived. The truth is that I had no plans for your snowy beard to bring winter home so early in my life. That I am not as strong as I let other people see, that I was born a nocturnal butterfly and I have not yet understood how to turn back into a human. I am fragile, breakable, easy to dismantle into black pieces like the ones in that puzzle we have been unable to put back together. I am too selfish to share my universe with someone else, too caught up in my own insanity, too afraid of being alive. I have no place for you in my world. It is a world of shadows where I've given up the prospect of hope. It is a world of loneliness and late nights, of waking up to an empty bed and a single breakfast. This is the life I have chosen. A life too small to share with someone else. And you are big, beautiful man, larger than I can be. You are made of one piece, and this is what I like of you. You are not pretentious in the knowledge of your greatness like I am; you strive to be better every day. These are things that I have given up as lost for myself, and I don't have the energy or the heart to look for them again. I, Angela Anais Nin, am the most tired woman in the world, and you require an effort that I cannot make. 

I want to sleep alone again, beautiful man, without the warmth of your body to keep my delirious nightmares at bay. I want to see the world on my own again, without the map of possibilities printed on your lips. I want to stay in a library until midnight until my eyes are drunk with ink, and come home tired but fulfilled. I am living a half, a double life, and I am not large enough a person to contain it within myself. I have to let you and your beauty go. If this had been different, if my purpose in life was other, if anything but committing fully to my path could make me feel at peace. In that world, you and I would have loved each other. In a world in which I deserved and looked for happiness, in which I was entitled to it, you and I would have made each other happy. We would have gone together anywhere we wanted. We would have had a family if I loved the world enough to believe in them. We would have laughed at the past and wondered at the future. I would not have held back any words, any gestures, any thoughts. We would have known it all. In a different world you were meant for me and I for you, like those silly stories that I've always made fun of. In a world that I will not let myself know. But that is not the world or the life I have chosen for myself. So I must let you go, you, the most beautiful man I've come across.

I will not lie to you in this, the farewell letter that you will never read. I will say, then, that it's true that I need to be loved, even though I was unable to admit it before. I am too used to being loved to understand this new place where I am not. I have been too spoiled, too cared for by past lovers, to settle for less than what I've had. I have seen eyes dark as a wolf's mouth that say they'll go insane if they lose me. And they will not, but they think they will, and that's enough. I have kissed mouths fragile as a city of glass that say I'm The One. Like in those silly stories I make fun of. And I'm not, and there's not a One Perfect Half waiting for you behind the next door. But they swear to themselves that I am, and it's enough. See, I love myself too much, beautiful man, to let you get away with not loving me. I never needed you to give anything up for me, but knowing that you would, that you would be willing to, would have been enough. It is easy, really: I deserve to be loved. And knowing this soothes, somewhat, the premonitory pain of knowing I'll lose you, you the one that turned the tables on me, the one who makes me believe that there's something worth fighting for when I wake next to you and see that there's still beauty in this broken world of ours.

So goodbye, beautiful man eyes of a wounded star.