Letter to Virginia.

I composed a beautiful letter to you
in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night,
and it has all gone:
I just miss you,
in a quite simple desperate human way.
You, with all your un-dumb letters,
would never write so elementary a phrase as that;
perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it.
And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap.
But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase
that it would lose a little of its reality.
Whereas with me it is quite stark:
I miss you even more than I could have believed;
and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.
So this letter is just really a squeal of pain.
It is incredible how essential to me you have become.
I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things.
Damn you, spoilt creature;
I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this
But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you:
I love you too much for that.
Too truly.
You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love.
I have brought it to a fine art.
But you have broken down my defences.
And I don’t really resent it.

Vita Sackville-West