Dearest Virginia

(reply)

I, too, am certain that it is harder and harder to stay afloat. The water is fast and deep and my pockets full of stones. I feel I have surrendered to a life I cannot breathe or bare or wake up to any more. I tried like you tried and failed like you failed and without you I would have thought that hope is still a pear waiting to be picked in a Sussex garden. I feel I did not understand this until you asked Mrs Dalloway to visit and she brought cake and we had tea and spoke about parties and vegetables. I'm afraid I've been buying the flowers myself for far too long or so the voices say. They are carnations and hydrangeas and perhaps lilies and sometimes I'm not certain which ones to choose, at all. I wanted to thank you for the other day when I heard the Big Ben chimes and remembered what you once said to me in London: *"The leaden circles dissolve in the air”. They did and I cried for no reason, no reason at all, because there was no reason left to cry for. If anyone could have saved me it wouldn't have been you. You opened my eyes and now, on sunny, monotone afternoons, I can even make up the face these hands are firmly holding under the surface.

C

*excerpt from Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf