WHAT A NIGHT! WILL! If I got through that, I can get through anything. I’m not going to see her again! GAH I wish I could collapse around your neck, dear friend, and cry and rant to you about all these feelings rushing over me…oh, Will…I’m sitting here, gasping for breath, trying to calm myself down, just keep it together until the morning, and the car service is all set to pick me up at 5 am.

Ahhhh and meanwhile she’s fast asleep and has no idea she’s never going to see me again…I cut myself loose, I did it, I got through that whole two-hour conversation without breaking down and telling them. And God, what a conversation!

Albert had promised me that he and Lotte would come walk with me in the botanic garden right after dinner. I stood on the terrace under the tall chestnut trees and watched the sun set for the last time for me over those lovely valleys and the gentle stream… so many times, I’d stood there with her and looked out at this exact same gorgeous scene, and now — I went up and down the tree-lined avenue I used to love so much; some mysterious emotional pull had drawn me there so many times before I even met Lotte, and we were so happy when we realized, while we were getting to know each other, that we were both such fans of this little spot, which I have to say is one of the most romantic man-made spaces I’ve ever seen.

First off, when you look down through the chestnut trees you’ve got this long view — oh wait, I think I told you all this already, didn’t I? About how high walls of beech trees close around you as you go, and the bushes get thicker and thicker, making it more and more shadowy, until it all ends in an enclosed little clearing where the air practically shivers with solitude… I can still feel how strangely moving it was when I first wandered in there, one sunny afternoon; I could sense, very faintly, how much joy and pain would play out there someday…

I’d been wallowing for about half an hour in the sweet, sad feeling of going away, of saying goodbye, when I heard their footsteps coming across the terrace. I ran over to them and hugged her with a shudder. Just as we started walking, the moon came up over the bushy hills; we talked about all sorts of things, not really paying attention to where we were going, and after a while we realized we were just outside that shadowy clearing. Lotte went in and sat down. Albert sat beside her, so did I; but I was so restless I couldn’t stay sitting; I stood up, stepped in front of her, walked back and forth, sat down again: it was…not a fun place to be in. She pointed out how beautifully the moon was lighting up the whole terrace where the beech trees ended: it was a gorgeous effect, and especially striking because where we were was so completely covered in shadow. We sat there gazing silently, and after a while she began, “Every time I go walking in the moonlight, every time, I always find myself thinking about the people I’ve loved and lost, I always feel this sense of death and future coming over me… We will live again!” she went on, in this gorgeous, emotional tone, “but, Werther, will we find each other again? recognize each other? What do you think? what do you feel?”

“Lotte,” I said, reaching out to her and tearing up, “we’ll see each other again! In this world and the next!” — I couldn’t keep going — Will, did she HAVE to ask me that, right when I was struggling with the idea of leaving??

“And do you think our loved ones who’ve passed on know how we’re doing?” she went on. “Do they feel it when we’re happy? when we think about them with love and affection? Ohhh, I can always feel my mother right behind my shoulder whenever I’m sitting on some quiet evening with her kids, with my kids, and they’re all gathered around me the way they used to sit around her… then I start crying, I miss her so much, and I look up to heaven and I wish she could look down for just a second and see I’m keeping my promise, like I promised her, right before she died: I will be a mother to your children. I get so emotional, I just burst out, ‘Forgive me, Mother, if I’m not everything for them that you were! Ahh! I mean, I’m doing everything I can, I keep them dressed and fed, eugh, and most importantly I keep them loved and cared for. If you could see how much we’ve come together, you dear saint!, you’d praise God and thank Him with all the passion in your heart that He listened when you prayed to Him with your last, bitterest tears to look after your children.’”

THE THINGS SHE SAID! Oh, Will, who could capture what she said? How could these cold keystrokes capture this heavenly efflorescence of the soul?!

Albert interrupted her gently and said, “You shouldn’t let it get to you like this, Lotte! Honey, I know how attached you are to this kind of thinking, but please —”
“Oh, Albert,” she said, “I know you haven’t forgotten those evenings, when we used to sit together at that small round table, when Daddy was away on business, and we’d tucked the kids in to bed…you always had some good book with you and still never got any reading done. — Wasn’t she just the most beautiful soul you ever met? that dear, gentle, cheerful woman, always so on top of everything! God knows the tears I’ve cried, throwing myself into bed at His feet, begging Him, ‘Please, make me just like her!’”

“Lotte!” I burst out, throwing myself at her feet, taking her hand and covering it with tears, “Lotte! You are so touched by the blessings of God, and by your mother’s spirit!”
“I wish you’d met her,” she said, squeezing my hand — “she deserved to meet you.” — I thought I was going to pass out. That’s the most amazing thing anyone’s said about me, ever — and she went on: “And she, of all people, had to pass away in the prime of her life, when her youngest son wasn’t even six months old! She didn’t suffer long; she was peaceful, resigned, the hardest part for her was her kids, the youngest especially. Oh, God — when she was close to the end, and she told me, ‘Bring them up to me,’ and I led them in, the little kids, who were all so confused, and the older ones, who were shattered…the way they stood around the bed, and she raised up her arms and prayed over them, and kissed them one by one and sent them away, and she said to me: ‘Be their mother!’ — I took her hand and swore I would! — ‘That’s a big promise, sweetheart,’ she said, ‘to love like a mother and see like a mother. But I’ve always been able to tell from the gratitude you’ve shown me that you know how hard this is. Give that love and attention to your brothers and sisters, and give your father the respect and loyalty of a wife. You’ll be a comfort to him.’ — She asked for him, but he’d gone out so we wouldn’t see him in such unbearable agony…the man was a wreck.
“Albert, you were in the room. She liked to hear people talk, and she asked for you and called you over, and the way she looked at you and me, so comforted and at peace seeing that we were happy together — that we’d be happy together…”

Albert collapsed around her neck and kissed her and screamed, “We are! We will be!” — Even Albert, Mr. Put-Together, had totally lost it, and I was so far gone I don’t know what I was doing.

“Werther,” she began, “and to think that this woman is gone! God! Sometimes, when I start thinking how you let the things you care about most just get taken away, and no one feels that harder than the kids, who cried for ages about how the men in black took their Mommy away!”

She stood up and I felt suddenly anxious and shaky and I sat there holding her hand. “We should go,” she said, “it’s getting late.” She tried to pull her hand loose and I held on to it harder.
“We’ll see each other again,” I screamed, “we’ll find each other again, no matter what shape we take, we’ll recognize each other. I’m off,” I went on, “I’m off and I’m okay with that, and even so, if I had to say it was for ever, I don’t think I could do it. Goodbye, Lotte! Goodbye, Albert! We’ll see each other again.”
“Um, yeah, tomorrow,” Lotte answered, smiling. That “tomorrow” hit me hard! Augh, she had no idea, as she pulled her hand away from mine — They walked off down the avenue, I stood up, watched them pass through the moonlight and threw myself onto the ground and cried myself out and jumped up and ran over to the terrace and down in the shadows of the tall linden trees just saw her white dress shimmer out the garden gate, I stretched out my arms, and it was gone.

I’ve got to get out of here! Will, thank you so much for helping me commit to this. I’ve been walking around for two weeks already telling myself to get away from her. I’ve got to get out of here. She’s in town again visiting a friend. And Albert — and — I’ve got to get out of here!

You miserable fuck! What’s WRONG with you? Why are you DOING this to yourself?! Where are you going with this CRAZY NEVERENDING OBSESSION?!? When I pray now, I only pray to her; when I close my eyes, she’s always there, and when I look around all I can see is how everything relates to her. And I can be happy in that mode for hours — until I have to tear myself away from her again! which — AHHH, WILL! which my heart keeps FORCING me to do! — When I’ve been hanging out with her for two, three hours, getting lost in how she looks, how she moves, how she speaks so fucking articulately, and bit by bit I start revving up, my vision starts to blur, I can barely hear, and I start choking as if someone was strangling me, then my heart kicks in and starts racing to clear my system, which only makes everything worse — Will, I barely even know where I AM! And, — unless the sadness takes over and Lotte lets me cry it out on her shoulder, which is amazing but also TERRIBLE, — then I just have to GO, I have to get out of there! and I throw myself around in the fields; then it feels great to go vault up a sheer cliff, go crashing through the woods, through the thistles, that cut me, through the thorns, that shred me! Then I feel a bit better! a BIT! And when I collapse sometimes from dehydration and exhaustion, and lie there, in the middle of the night sometimes, with the full moon high above me, in the lonely forest, and I sit down on a crooked tree-trunk, just to give my screaming feet a rest, and doze off into this drained sleep in the half-light! oh, Will! a ward in solitary, a straightjacket, some padded walls would be just PERFECT. Goodbye! I don’t see any out for this misery but death.

Man…if whatever’s broken inside me were fixable, these would be the people <3 Today’s my birthday, and bright and early this morning I found a little package in the mail from Albert. Right away when I opened it, I realized the lining was the little pink wrap Lotte was wearing the night I met her, that I’ve begged her for like a bazillion times since then. And wrapped up inside it was a pair of little green books — the Loeb Odyssey, the edition I’ve been wanting for ages to take on walks with me so I wouldn’t have to schlep around a dictionary. I mean — look at that! they know what I want before I even say it, they’re always finding these sweet little gestures that mean so much more than those schmancy presents people give you to beat you over the head with how rich they are. I can’t stop kissing that shawl, and every time I breathe it in, I taste a memory of the joy that overflowed from those brief, happy, irrevocably lost days… Will, it’s true, and I’m not just being grumpy, the joys we have in life are just — daylilies! How many blossoms wilt and fade away without a trace? how often do they actually bear fruit? And how many of those fruits ever ripen? But even so there are more than enough…and, I mean — unngh, Will! Can you just let ripe fruit lie there and rot, untasted and unenjoyed?

I hope you’re well! It’s gorgeously summery here; I’ve been spending a lot of time up in the fruit trees in Lotte’s orchard with the fruit-picker (a kind of long stick with pincers), plucking pears from the treetops. She stands below me and catches them when I drop them down to her.

It’s terrible, Will, my whole ability to function is so out of whack, I just sit around feeling restless and useless, I can’t get excited about anything and I can’t do anything either. My imagination’s gone, nature doesn’t do anything for me, and I get sick even thinking about reading. When you lose your self, you lose everything :-/ Seriously, sometimes I wish I were a construction worker, just so I could wake up in the morning and have some idea what was going to happen that day, some kind of structure, something to look forward to… I even get jealous of Albert, seeing him buried in paperwork, and I keep picturing myself being happy in his place! I’ve been this close over and over again to writing Jim about that job you keep saying he’d totally give me. I’d probably still need to apply, though, right? I should write to Master Smith…he always liked me, and he always told me he’d write me a recommendation if I ever applied for anything. And it couldn’t take me more than an hour to put everything together. But then if I take a step back, I always start thinking about that fable about the horse who got bored of being free, so he let himself be saddled and bridled, and ended up getting ridden to death…and I just don’t know what I should do…and, Will! what if this longing inside me to change things up is just some kind of fundamental inner dissatisfaction that’ll follow me around wherever I go?

She’s never there…I try to hold her in the morning, when I’m struggling to wake up from scary dreams…I feel around for her at night in my bed when some beautiful innocent dream had me so sure I was sitting beside her in the grass holding her hand covering her with kisses…augh…and then sometimes I’m still asleep enough to think I actually feel her there, and it makes me so happy — and then the tears come flooding out of all the pain wedged up inside me, and I cry and cry at how bleak everything looks…

Does it always have to be this way? That whatever used to make you happy ends up TORTURING you?

The full, warm feeling I used to get from the aliveness of nature, that had me drowning in happiness, that turned the world around me into paradise, has turned into this UNBEARABLE TORMENTOR, this HAUNTING GHOST, that follows me around wherever I go… I used to look out from the cliffs past the river all the way to the hills, over this whole fertile valley, and see everything budding and sprouting; I’d see those mountains covered from foot to peak with tall, thick trees, see those ravines with all their twists and turns dotted with those beautiful woods, and the gentle river flowing between the whispering reeds, reflecting the pretty clouds drifting up above in the gentle evening breeze… I’d hear the forest around me come to life with birdsong, while a thousand clouds of midges danced nimbly in the last red sunbeams, and that last glimmer of sun brought the beetles humming out of the grass…and the buzzing and whirring all around me made me look down at the ground, and I’d see the moss sucking its nutrients out of my cliffs and the broom growing up from the dry sandhills, proving how much hidden, glowing, sacred life-force there is under the earth — and I used to embrace that all so PASSIONATELY, I felt like a DEMIGOD, overflowing with this fullness, and I could feel all these magnificent creations of earth moving inside me mingling their life-force with mine. Stark precipices loomed around me, chasms opened at my feet, the rivers rushed below me, and the forests and the mountains rang out; and I could see all them all, all the subterranean forces kneading and spawning all together in the depths of the earth — and now look at the earth and sky, swarming with these infinite unique creatures…every inch of everything filled with a million forms of life; and PEOPLE, meanwhile, board themselves up in their houses and huddle together and think they rule the world! How sad! valuing everything so little, because you’re so small… From the impassable crag to the desert where no man has set foot all the way to the floors of unknown oceans, the Spirit of Creation flows everywhere, and He rejoices in every particle that draws on Him and lives. — Gah! back in those days, the beat of a passing eagle’s wings would send me yearning for the coast of some measureless sea, where I might drink from the frothy cup of the Infinite a flowing dram of joy, and, for just one moment, the pressure in my heart might be soothed by a drop of the peace of the Being that creates all things in itself and through itself.

*sigh*…oh, Will, just thinking back to those days makes me feel so whole. Even just making myself summon up those transcendent feelings and describe them again is putting me in such a better place, it makes me realize that much more what terrible shape I’m in now…

It’s like someone pulled aside a curtain in my mind, and this whole scene of limitless life is morphing in front of me into the black hole of an infinite mass grave. Can you really say anything’s real, when it’s all going to die? when everything gets swept away like a flash flood, and practically never makes it through its whole lifespan, gah! gets swept up by the storm, dragged under the water, and smashed against the cliffs? Every second that goes by destroys you and the people you love, and makes you a destroyer too, unavoidably; even going for a walk means killing a thousand worm babies, one single step annihilates the homes that ants have slaved over and stamps out a whole tiny world in a gruesome holocaust. HA! All the terrible once-in-a-lifetime disasters of the world, the tsunamis that wipe away whole villages, the earthquakes that swallow whole cities, they don’t move me at all; what kills me is the murderous power lying hidden in the heart of Nature itself — which has never created anything that didn’t destroy itself and everything around it. So I go staggering around terrified! With the sky and the earth and the threads of life weaving around me! All I see is an infinite tooth-gnashing lip-smacking maw.

It’s so true… nothing ties people together like love. I can tell Lotte would be sad to see me go, and the kids can’t imagine a world where I don’t come back the next day forever. I went over there today to tune Lotte’s piano, but I never got around to it because the young’uns kept chasing me around asking for a story, and Lotte said herself that I should give them what they wanted, so! I sliced up the bread for their evening snack (they’re almost as happy to get it from me as from Lotte now!) and I told them my go-to fairy tale about the princess who’s waited on by a pair of magical hands. I’m learning so much from this — really, though! — and I’m amazed by how much it stays with them. Like, sometimes, if I have to come up with a detail on the spot, and I forget it the second time, they always jump right in and say, no, it was different last time! so now I’m working on nailing down one consistent version I can unspool in a single singing stream of syllables :P One thing it’s taught me is that if an author ever tweaks a story for its second edition, even if it’s way better written, he’s 100% guaranteed to mess up his book. We’re very receptive to first impressions, and the way people are, they’ll eat up even the craziest stuff; but it sticks that much stronger, so you better not try erasing or crossing anything out!

Yup, it’s settled, Albert’s the Best Guy Ever. I had quite the scene with him yesterday. I popped over to say goodbye — I’d decided I really wanted to bike out to the mountains, where I’m drafting this — and as I was strolling around his study, I noticed a very slick pair of pistols on his gunrack.
“Can I borrow a gun for my trip?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, “as long as you’re willing to pick up some ammunition yourself; I just keep them up there for show.” I took one down, and he continued, “I’ve had such nasty surprises even thinking I was being careful with them that I don’t touch the darn things anymore.”
That sounded like a story, I said. He went on: “I was staying for a few months with a friend on his farm, and I had a pair of pistols with me I kept around, unloaded — it just helped me sleep easier. One day, some rainy afternoon, I was sitting around bored, and I don’t know why, I just suddenly started thinking, ‘We might get robbed, we might need the guns, what if —’ you get the idea. I cleaned and loaded them and went to the bathroom; right then, two of our friends came in, and the guy started trying to impress the girl or scare her, and God knows how, the safety came off and he shot her in the hand at point blank range and shattered her thumb. And then I had to deal with all the fallout and help pay for her surgery… Since then I leave all my guns unloaded. Kind of makes you wonder why we even bother being careful! If something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. Although —”
Now, you know, I love this guy, but when he gets to his “ALTHOUGH”s — I mean, isn’t it obvious that any general statement has exceptions? But this guy is so scrupulous! that when he feels like he’s said something hasty, or over-general, or half-true — then he can’t stop qualifying and rephrasing and re-re-analyzing until in the end there’s nothing left at all. And this time he went wayyyy down the rabbit hole; eventually I tuned him out, my mind started wandering, and I made this ‘kill me now’ gesture, putting the muzzle of the gun against my forehead over my right eye.
“Hey!” said Albert, snatching the gun away from me, “What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s not loaded,” I said.
“Even so, what’s wrong with you?” he shot back impatiently. “I can’t imagine how anyone could be stupid enough to shoot himself. It makes me sick just thinking about it.”
“You people!” I exclaimed. “You can’t talk about anything without being all, ‘that’s stupid, that’s smart, that’s good, that’s bad’! And what does that even mean? Have you actually gone and dug up all the details of the situation? can you actually explain what led up to it, why it happened, why it had to happen? Maybe if you had, you wouldn’t be so quick to judge.”
“Come on,” said Albert, “you have to admit some actions are wrong no matter why you do them.”
I shrugged and said, sure. — “But, Albert,” I went on, “there are exceptions to that too. It’s true that stealing is a crime; but if a man ends up having to steal to keep himself and his family from starving to death, does he deserve punishment, or sympathy? Who’d throw the first stone against the husband who kills his cheating wife and her slimy lover in his righteous fury? Or against the girl who surrenders in a transcendent moment to the irresistible pull of desire? Even our cold, heartless legal system feels for cases like those and goes easy on them.”
“That’s a whole different situation,” Albert answered, “because the thought there is that, if the defendant was swept away by passion, he’s lost the power of rational thought, so he gets treated as if he’d been drunk or crazy.”
“Oh, you reasonable people!” I exclaimed, smiling. “ ‘Passion’! ‘Drunk’! ‘Crazy’! You stand there so detached, so void of sympathy, you proper people! You snicker at the drunks, you turn away from the crazies, you walk on by like the priest and thank God like the Pharisee that he didn’t make you like one of them. I’ve been drunk more than once, my passions have always been a little crazy, and I don’t regret either one: because over time I’ve realized all the great men who’ve ever accomplished anything extraordinary or impossible-seeming have always been called crazy or drunk by people who didn’t understand.
“But even just in the day-to-day, it’s unbearable, anytime anyone does anything free-spirited, or principled, or unexpected, someone has to say, ‘That guy’s drunk!’ ‘He’s stupid!’ You should be ashamed, you stuffy people, you starched shirts! You should be ashamed!”
“Oh please, you’re just riffing now,” said Albert, “you always make such a big deal out of everything, and anyway this time you’re definitely wrong, because you’re comparing suicide, which is what we were actually talking about, with great accomplishments — when really’s it’s just being weak, and that’s all there is to it. Because obviously it’s easier to die than to actually deal with the difficult things in your life.”
I was this close to breaking the conversation off there; because nothing sends me up the wall faster than when someone comes along with some meaningless platitude when I’m speaking from the heart. But I took a deep breath, and answered him, a little tensely, “You think it’s being weak? Albert, please, appearances can be deceiving. If a people is groaning under the oppressive yoke of a tyrant, is it being weak when they finally rise up and break their chains? Or when a man, horrified that a car has rolled over his son, lifts it right off the ground, which he could never have done calmly; or when someone’s fighting for his life, and in his desperation takes down six opponents — are they being weak? And, Albert, if that kind of push is being strong, why should an extreme version be the opposite?”
Albert looked at me and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I really don’t see how any of those examples are relevant here.”
“That’s totally possible,” I said, “people are always telling me my thought process can get pretty rambly sometimes. Okay — then let’s see if we can find some other way of understanding what might be going on in someone’s head when they decide that being alive, as great as that is, is more than they can take. Because it’s not fair for us to talk about this unless we approach it with some sympathy.
“The human self,” I continued, “has its limits: it can only bear happiness, sadness, or pain up to a certain point, and it breaks down as soon as that point is passed. So this really has nothing to do with whether someone’s weak or strong, right? It’s about whether they can take the amount of pain that they’re feeling, and that could be physical or psychological; so I think it’s just as strange to say, ‘That man is a coward for killing himself’, as it would be inappropriate to call someone a coward for dying of a malignant tumor.”
“Sophistry! Pure sophistry!” Albert exclaimed.
“Not really,” I replied. “I mean, think about how chronic illness works: someone’s health is under so much pressure that they get weaker and weaker and their whole system falls apart so much that finally the body can’t repair itself anymore, and there’s no way of turning things around to get them healthy again.
“Cool. Now let’s think about the mind. Say there’s this person, going along in his typical courses of thought, with things making impressions on him like they do, ideas taking root in him, until finally some cancerous emotion spreads through his whole mental faculty and breaks him down.
“What’s your detached, reasonable person going to do now when he sees him like this? What’s he going to say to him? There’s nothing he can do — no more than a healthy person standing by a sickbed can channel his health into the sick man.”
Albert still thought I was overgeneralizing. I reminded him of of a girl in the news recently who was found dead in a river, and went over her story for him again:
“She was a normal, quiet girl who grew up in the sheltered little bubble of home and school, with no real concept of happiness beyond hanging out with her friends at the mall in her one nice outfit she’d pieced together, maybe going to a school dance once in a while, and going on for hours and hours with her best friend about gossip and drama.
“Suddenly, she starts to feel this fire inside her, these inner drives, and guys are flirting with her, which just amps things up further, and everything she used to like starts seeming so boring — until, finally, she meets a guy she’s drawn to, irresistibly, by this feeling she’s never felt before, she wraps all her hopes around him, forgets everything else, she can’t hear or see or feel anything but him, The One, all she wants is him, The One. She doesn’t play hard to get, she knows what she wants and she’s going for it, she wants to be his, she wants to fuse with him forever and find the happiness she’s been missing, everything she ever wanted, all at once. Whispered promises seal the deal, stolen kisses drive her wild — and she is gone; she’s floating in a haze of anticipation, she’s cranked all the way up. Finally she reaches out to take her dreams in her arms — and her crush dumps her.
“Stunned, semi-conscious, she’s standing at a cliff; everywhere she looks is darkness, no way out, no hope, no clue! because HE’S gone… the only one who made her feel real. She can’t see her whole life still ahead of her, or all the people who could take his place, she feels alone and totally abandoned, — and, blind, pushed into a corner by the agony in her heart, she jumps, to smother her pain under the all-encompassing blanket of death.
“See, Albert, so many people have stories just like that! and I mean, isn’t that a case of illness? The self can’t find its way out of the maze of convoluted contradictory forces, and the person has to die.
“And screw anyone who’d look at that and say, ‘Stupid girl! If she’d only waited, if she’d just given it time, she’d have gotten over it, she’d have found someone new to comfort her before she knew it.’ That’s just like saying, ‘What an idiot, dying of cancer! If he’d only waited until his body recovered, until his immune system kicked in, and his symptoms had died down — everything would have been fine, and he’d still be alive!’”
Albert, who still couldn’t see the connection, said a bunch of things, including: I’d only been talking about one silly girl; but how a smart person, who wasn’t so sheltered, who’d seen more of the world, could be excused for that sort of thing, that he didn’t understand.
“Albert,” I exclaimed, “people are people, and being smart or whatever doesn’t really come up when your passions are raging and pushing you to the limits of your humanity. And on top of that — Some other time,” I said, and grabbed my bag. eugh my heart was so full… and we split up, without either of us really getting where the other was coming from. Like people hardly ever do in this world.

I could have such a great, happy life if I weren’t such a dumbass… I mean, how lucky am I to have so many things around me that you’d think would make me feel fulfilled? sigh. I guess it goes to show, the only thing that can make you happy is you :-/ I get to be part of this wonderful family, with so much love all around — Albert seeing me as a son, the kids seeing me as a father, and Lotte…! — And Albert’s being so sweet, he’s not making anything awkward or weird, just letting me be happy; being so open and friendly and warm; I’m basically his best friend, after Lotte… it’s adorable, Will, listening to us walk together telling each other how great Lotte is; this has to be the world’s most absurd bromance, and even so it brings me to tears, just thinking about it…

He’s been telling me about her incredible mother — how on her deathbed she bequeathed the house and kids to Lotte and charged her with looking after them, and Lotte’s been a whole different person ever since, she’s become so attentive and so dedicated and really grown into being a true mother, and every second, she’s caring for them or working, and even still, she hasn’t lost any of her cheerfulness and optimism… — I just walk along beside him and pick flowers along the path, tie them very neatly into a wreath, and — throw them into the stream rushing past us, and watch them quietly drift away. — I don’t know if I mentioned yet that Albert’s staying here and starting a very well-paying job at a law firm he has connections at. I think he might be the most organized hard-working person I’ve ever met.