Please, let me know that you’re home safe and sound. It’s been three days, haven’t it, three days already. Time is a funny thing. Since we parted by the station, I’ve tried to imagine what your next letter would be like, whether the tone would be very different from before, whether we’d be able to recognise our past selves in our present expressions. I feel changed. Arséne, I feel changed! I came to Marseille, not knowing what to expect, with my heart utterly raw from waiting, thinking, obsessing - and then! Then.
I remember well the ocean, the way it blended with the sky and made the horizon look endless, as if you’d chosen a whole different world for us to meet in, a place so far removed from everything else that no one would know us, maybe not even ourselves. You were beautiful as always, in that world as well as any other. I think about your beard, still. If I rub my fingertips together just so, it’s like I can still feel the small hairs between them as well as your own, particular warmth underneath. When I drink coffee in the morning, it’s an aftertaste, settling on my palette immediately behind the echoes you’ve left for me. All other impressions must forever bow to that - be pushed to the background, dimmed and weak. I can’t imagine anything overruling what you've so generously given me here, my dear, but then again, I’ve had you before and lost you.
My soul refuses to remember.
But Marseille is marvelous, isn’t it? Not too hot at this time of year but still so far removed from the winter snow currently piling up on the streets below my window here in Paris. My fingers were definitely eager to please, as you recall. The pieces I wrote, I’m keeping in my drawer for now, tied with silk. Which did you like the best, I wonder? I think I can guess but I’m in a vain sort of mood and I’d like to have your words for it rather than my own, scattered thoughts. I keep thinking - if you haven’t written to me yet, then surely it’s simply a practical matter, surely I’m running only a few metres ahead of you now and you’ll be catching up to me as quickly as when we shared our breaths in the air underneath the open hotel window.
Yes, but anyway - tell me how you prefer me.
And when next we meet, I’ll play your chosen favourites for you in the dark, to let you know that I’ve kept your compliments - all of them, Arséne - close to my chest.
(( February 4th, 1849 ))