All I have to do is look into her eyes, and it’s like a shot of inner peace! And I think it’s so messed up that, meanwhile, Albert doesn’t seem as happy as he… hoped… as I…. thought maybe… if….. yeah, yeah, DOT DOT DOT, but I don’t know how else to say it here… and I think it’s clear enough.

Wagner has kicked Homer out of my heart. What a genius! What a JOURNEY! Hurtling through the woods with the storm roaring around me, the swords and spears of my foes rattling at my back — hearing echoes off the cliffs, over the rush of the Rhine through the trees, of the maidens’ lament burbling up through the water, and the screams of the poor pregnant girl hunched over her soulmate’s bleeding body and the shards of his much-needed sword… then meeting the grey old god wandering over the doomed earth, stumbling over the graves of his son, his daughters, his grandson, piling wood around Valhalla waiting to burn himself down, thinking back to the days when the gods were young and the rainbow bridge glowed with the promise of life… when I see the despair on his face, see the free, fearless hero stabbed in the back by the people he loved, floating down the river in a fog of the past — Glowing flames Fire up my heart To hold him completely, Enfolded in him, In the fire of feeling To be FUSED with him! SIEGFRIED! SIEGFRIED!— oh, WILL! I wish I could help the Valkyrie onto her horse, send her into the pyre — end her torture and pain — and then throw myself in after her.

Ahhhh, this hole! This horrible HOLE I feel here in my chest! — I keep thinking if once, just ONCE, you could press her against your heart, it would fill this hole right up…

Yeah, it just gets clearer to me, Will, clearer and clearer, how little it actually matters whether you exist or not… so little. One of Lotte’s girlfriends came over, and I went into the next room to grab a book, I couldn’t focus, and finally I got out my laptop to write you. I could hear them talking faintly; they were telling each other meaningless stuff, gossip: how X got married, how Y’s sick. Super sick.
“She’s got this hacking cough, her cheekbones are practically poking through her skin, she keeps passing out; there’s no way she’s gonna make it,” the friend said.
“N…. is in such bad shape too,” Lotte said.
“I know, he’s so bloated…”
And my hyperactive imagination launched me over to these poor people’s bedsides: I could see them, how reluctantly they turned their backs on life, how they — Will! And these chicks were talking about it the way you’d talk about it if, like — a stranger was dying. — And when I look around and see this room, and Lotte’s clothes and Albert’s files all around me, and the furniture that feels so homey to me now, even this trash can, and I think: See how much you mean to this house? Everything. Your friends treasure you! You make them so happy, and you feel in your heart like they couldn’t live without you; but — if you went away, if you split out of this circle? Would they — how long would they feel the hole that your loss tore into their lives? How long? — ahhh, we’re so transient, that even in the one place where we can actually be certain we exist, where we leave the one real mark of our being, in the thoughts, in the souls of our loved ones, even there we fade away, disappear, inevitably, and so fast!

It makes me want to rip my chest open and smash in my skull, how little we can actually DO for each other. Ah, the love, the joy, the warmth and delight that I don’t bring to life, no one else can give me, and all the peace in my heart can’t make someone else happy when they’re standing there frozen and powerless in front of me.

I’ve got so much, and these feelings for her swallow it all, I’ve got so much, and without her it’s all nothing.

The number of times I’ve been this close to just throwing myself at her! God knows what that DOES to you, seeing so much loveliness going back and forth in front of you and not being allowed to touch it; and, I mean, touching is such a natural human impulse. Don’t babies try to grab everything that gets their attention? — And me?