5/24/41

That night at the party, when I sat down beside you on the couch and we started talking, you might have been anyone else, any of the other people in the room I talked with that night. I can’t say yet what it was exactly that made you suddenly different. But I loved you then, because you were strange. I loved you when you said good night to me. I loved you all the next day, though I couldn’t sleep, or eat, or read, or even think coherently about you. Then when I did see you, I felt stupid, or I felt that you would think me stupid because I couldn’t take my eyes off you. You were so very offhand and wonderful when I first came. We walked out onto the sidewalk down to a dive of a bar, and sat in a booth. And it was then that something fell away from you like a mantle slipped off the shoulders—perhaps I should say like a screen that conceals something not too attractive. I wish I could say what it was. Because if I knew—if it were simple enough to be discovered, I might be able to forget it. I should at least know what to fight, what it is keeping us apart. Perhaps I was shocked because you seemed to give me too much attention. Perhaps I was silly and didn’t want anyone, after all, that I really might have. I don’t know. But I know that after that wonderful evening before, when you hardly spoke to me, and after that sleepless night and that nerve-shaken day, and the counted hours before I finally saw you again—after all that, the change in you, (or in me) was like the sudden, unwelcome awakening from a glorious dream. An awakening on a Monday morning when, with one’s castle and clouds and the silver sea dissolved into a sordid room, one realizes that one has to get up and dress in the cold night in a few minutes and plod through a weary day.