Your Letters... (A Miniature)

To C. P.


I've kept them all, printed, collected and preserved intact - here, in the folder for papers which, as the time passed, has become incredibly fat. I've lost count just how often I took them out to read and re-read again and again, sometimes with excitement, sometimes with sharp pain, sometimes with this feeling of bittersweet heartache and longing so well known to everybody who really loved, at least once in his or her life.

Some of these letters still keep the traces of my fingertips as I was enjoying my chocolate or jam, silently speaking with you or laughing heartily at your jokes. Some of them still remember the touch of my lips as I covered them with kisses - the most childish gesture, even foolish, I must admit...  especially in our postmodern era when Word processors and E-mail usually replace a pen and a sheet of paper. But what did it matter, anyway, if they were from you - and these printed lines, brief or eloquent, but always filled with love and care, seemed to be the only thin thread, the only connection between me and you?...

I've also lost count how many times I was tempted to tear them apart and throw them out. Or to take them to a solitary place - anything goes - and burn them to ashes. Once and forever. Just to let them go - and to let you go with them. But I still feel most strongly that if I destroy them, something precious, something really important would go from my life immediately - most likely never to return again. To live without them would mean for me about the same as to live without a ray of sunlight.

So often we're too busy. So often we're preoccupied with other things, that at least some of us have lost this ability to discern what is temporary and what is eternal, what is shallow and what is important, what is true and what is feigned. Sometimes these letters are the source of anguish for me. Sometimes they're the source of inspiration which is above every human word. I do know most of them by heart. I repeat them when I'm alone or desperate, and, strange as it may seem now, the magic of these letters never stops to work, even when my spirits are at the lowest ebb possible. So far as they're there, the miracle could happen every day... every hour... every minute.

... And that's why they're still there. Your spectacular, incredible, passionate letters. In the folder for papers which, as the time passed, has become incredibly fat.  

And that's why they will remain with me forever.

For even if the only one word in them is true, they're definitely worthy of being kept.


Svetlana Goryacheva

June 23, 2008