Anaïs, I don’t know how to tell you what I feel. I live in perpetual expectancy. You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late. You numb me.
I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
When does real love begin? At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity. At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love? At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession.
To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.
I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman! I can’t see how I can go on living away from you…
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
— Anais Nin
This is the kind of relationship I want: long letters and brief, passionate encounters.
I let him inhale me, then I slip away.
Before, I almost used to think there was something wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on. I never feel the brakes. I overflow. And when I feel your excitement about life flaring, next to mine, then it makes me dizzy.
— Anais Nin to Henry Miller
What is more touchingly real than your room? The iron bed, the hard pillow, the single glass. And all sparkling like a Fourth of July illumination because of my joy, the soft billowing joy of the womb you inflamed. The room is full of the incandescence you poured into me. The room will explode when I sit at the side of your bed and you talk to me. I don’t hear your words: your voice reverberated against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you to me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.
I am impervious to the flat visual attack of things. I see your khaki shirt hung up on a peg. It is your shirt and I could see you in it — you, wearing a color I detest. But I see you, not the khaki shirt. Something stirs in me as I look at it, and it is certainly the human you. It is a vision of the human you revealing an amazing delicacy to me. It is your khaki shirt and you are the man who is the axis of my world now. I revolve around the richness of your being.
“Come closer to me, come closer. I promise you it will be beautiful.”
You keep your promise.
— Anais Nin, in a letter to Henry Miller
