I owe people money and I am writing again. I must tell you. I love you my darling. I hope that you are not lonely. I have to do collateral damage. Please do not be angry with me but I have to write this play to earn an extra income.
I want to do right by you. You are everything to me and because you are everything to me, I will move heaven and earth to see to it that what I am writing will become a roaring success. I do miss you. Do you ever think of me sometimes? Man is flesh and bone, a violent creature but a woman is something else. She can illuminate the world around her, dance around it surrounded by the things that love her the most, her children and her husband without lifting a finger. Glories lie aside; men take what they can get. They take to lovers but I am all yours.
I think of your beauty but you are beautiful in a myriad of ways. Even my daydreaming turns into transformations. In the dark, I am a floating body made up of God particles. I have a confession to make. I am crazy about you. I read books the way inexperienced girls take to lovers. All I have now are these glorious winter dreams about you. Not all the time but just sometimes. Whatever I was thinking and feeling before, the writer’s block is gone now. Thank heavens for that otherwise I would never have got out of this mess alive if you know what I mean. One day people will love you, sing your praises to the rooftops and the next if you owe them money it becomes dangerous to be alive. I want to be with you not just for appearances sake all the time when I am away from you. It is getting late. It is getting dark and I still have plenty of work to do.
Now that I have found you, I have found inspiration for every sonnet. I want you. I am haunted by you as I am by any woman’s lot in life. Just think of me. Think of my loneliness and my fear. The fear that I have that I will never be able to provide for you or the fear that I have that I will never write again. All I do is imagine you cooking up a feast and gardening. You are grand. You are grand. A lot of the time when I spend time with other playwrights, they ask what my secret is. You have to live and then they ask me, these playwrights who are just as successful as I am but who are or rather seem to be jealous out of their minds at how prolific I am ask me, well how do you live? Know your limits I say. Know your limits when it comes to drinking and know your limits when it comes to women but especially know your limits when it comes to borrowing money.
Do not forget that everything in life is a struggle when you are an adult. I live from hand to mouth but they just roll their eyes and scoff. Even when I was a child, life was difficult but I had a mother and a father who loved me and could explain the ins and the outs of the world to me poignantly, beautifully, wonderfully. Life was a zoo country. If I tell them that, I write about myself mostly and as often as I can about the women who have stripped beauty from my heart and wonder from my life I know that they will not believe me. I write for the working classes. I write to emancipate myself from the class structure in London, England. They want to talk about leaving a legacy. Balderdash I say to that. Balderdash. They want to live forever and in wanting to live forever, they forget that they have to live now. Another thing what they fail to do is write all the time even when they do not feel inspired.
They wait for a woman to arrive on the scene so that they can admire her and love her to death inside of their heads of all places. This is the madness that I have to live with on a daily basis. None of these men really seem very sane at all to me. We are all in it together. Art. The art form of the play. We drink together. We live together. We inspire each other. Sometimes we bounce ideas off each other. We are fiercely competitive. It is in man’s nature to be fiercely competitive with each other. How do you do it repeatedly? How do you triumph when we fail to do so, they ask. Here in my room it is cold and drafty but all I have to do is think of you and everything is all right again in my world. Parachutes of winter light and cold air. I am hungry for the light. I find it difficult for the inspiration to kick in when I write by candlelight. The light to me is spiritual like the writer’s intuition.
The sunlight is honest because it reveals everything. Even a hideous man can become beautiful. Every soldier’s fissures has a psychological and a physiological framework. I am fortunately not a soldier. Do not have those terrible war scenes written on the blueprint of my mind. The horrors of war. I look at the young men who have survived. Who have come back and I cannot look into their eyes. There is no life there. Imagine if these young men were to marry, their young wives, and what if they brought children into the world what kind of household would that be. All women are elegant and sophisticated in their own way even an ugly woman. I will not talk about my childhood to you. I will not talk to you about children but what I will talk to you about is love and pleasure. Rather I will talk to you about insights, about courage and about the motivation to write.
I meet so many fools. Where are all the wise men I ask myself? They say for a man to be wise he has to have a wife. In the state I am in right now, all I do is stare blankly at the walls around me. Sure, I feel isolated. The thing is I do not need praise in order to write. Just a little bit of encouragement from the fools around me who keep on telling me that they can never write again because they have just lost the love of their life. The love of his life in question usually belongs to someone else in the first place. I will still be in love with the halo, and the crown of your head while intimacy will be a dying art form for millennial couples. So even shrouds burst into song or leaves of grass from time to time. Here I will be forsaken for a raging lunatic who has seen his dead father’s ghost.
