from the love letters of Zelda Fitzgerald, Part II

— I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones.
— Please don’t be depressed: nothing is sad about you except your sadness and the frayed places on your pink kimono and that you care so much about everything—You are the only person who’s ever done all they had to do, damn well, and had enough left over to be dissatisfied—Stop looking for solace: there isn’t any, and if there were life would be a baby affair.
— Today I went to sleep on your bed. It was like dozing in a lullaby swung on the ends of time and space.
— The things we can do ourselves are all that really move us: Which is why our intellects and our emotions subsist in different spheres and ceaselessly destroy us with their battles.
— I feel like a person lost in some Gregorian but feminine service here—I have come in on the middle and did not get the beginning and cannot stay for the end but so must somehow seize the meaning.
— Firetrucks are ripping up the night outside in ruthless clangs and shrieks like an angry seamstress splitting silk.
— I have been reading about a thing called the “Lorraine glass” which old masters used for reducing the value of light. Sometimes I would be content to apply the thing to life.
— Personal love should be incidental music, maybe.
— Being so close, we must move cytoplasmically across a great many people’s visions like visitations from another world. I’m sure my family secretly thinks that you’re the crazy one: they’ve read stories like that, about incarcerated wives. Your mother, of course, thinks we are both in the Russian secret service and prefer bombs to June strawberries for breakfast.
— The story of myself versus myself. That is the book I really want to write.
— I have often told you that I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal. Anyway, that is the way I am. Life moves over me in a vast black shadow and I swallow whatever it drops with relish, having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds too fantastic for even my disordered imagination. So: it is very easy to make yourself loved when one lives off love.