It was to me she was reading. I knew it. Yes, I understood, but no one else did. Once more, the sense of profound intimacy that communion beyond the power of words of caresses to bestow, gathered me to her heart. I was with her, beside her, forever close to her, in that infinitely lovely, infinitely distant star, which shed its mingled rays of sorrow, affection, and renouncement on the dark, cold world below (Olivia 101).

Meg sits for a long time. Plays with stones in her pockets.

Everything moves. Everything shifts.

Everything piles up, sediment on my heart.

Those unseen parts of us like unseen particles

Flying through the air

Attach themselves

Like sediment

Sometimes it's hard to get out of bed.

Sometimes I have trouble.

Sunday 21 June, 1936

After a week of intense suffering--indeed mornings of torture--and I'm not exaggerating--pain in my head--a feeling of complete despair & failure--a head inside like the nostrils after hay fever--here is a cool quiet morning again, a feeling of relief; a respite:hope... (24).

Tuesday 23 June, 1936

My brain is like a scale: one grain pulls it down. Yesterday it balanced. Today it dips (25).

Saturday 8 March, 1941

Oh yes, I shall conquer this mood. It is a question of being open sleepy, wide eyed at present--letting things come one after the other. Now to cook the haddock.

Monday 24 March, 1941

A curious seaside feeling in the air today. Everyone leaning against the wind, nipped and silenced. All pulp removed.

This windy corner. And Nessa is in Brighton, & I am imagining how it wd be if we were to infuse souls.

L. is doing the rhododendrons.

Take of sweater. Pick up bag. Put on shoes.

Meg sees table.

She sits with papers

Touching your letters

Holding them

In my hands

Aware that your fingers were once here

And here

And here

How many stars were out that night?

What kinds of trees surrounded your room? Fog hanging on the grass. Your garden in bloom. Did you sit in the sun, your back cool against a tree, your cheeks and chest warm in the light?Or was it cold and damp outside?

Summer, spring, autumn, winter. Some of the letters are dated, some are not.

Your desire for friends. All the time you spent in bed.

Common and frequent bouts of illness.

Did it feel like you had fallen into a dark hole? Did it feel impossible to get out?

A deep sadness in your chest like a heavy weight, keeping you down.

Meg looks at her notes, reads

I know I am breaking the rule of our friendship in writing   -- as we ought not to speak till next june, but forgive this...

Having been ill on off for four months and so having to put aside a new novel¿

Having spent many weeks in bed wishing you would walk in.   No such luck!

I am up but write lying down¿

My fingers tremble with rage.

I write in haste with trembling paw, so had better type.

Have been in bed for over a fortnight with some sort of a flu that has a disastrous effect on the nervous system. And your letter gleamed through my drowsiness like the gin gets silver fish. In fact I pulled it out and read it several times.

My dear Dorothy

My dear Dorothy

I am not sure whose fault it is that we never meet, except when you cut me in the heart

However I doubt our meeting in London is any good. But what I want to suggest is that we might meet in france, where I suppose you to be. I'm having windows put in a small peasants hut in a wood near Cassis --- I hope to be there off and on.

With the wisdom of a serpent, to which kind you belong, you have never attemped a regular life with your kind in London, withdrawing as you do to some hole of your own, you avoid our miseries and our irritations. And then you cut me - and I did try another attempt and you never came.

You must come.

This is ghastly. I mean the flight of time and no tea party!
There was your tea waiting and you never came.

I do hope our teas aren't doomed. You must come to London if for them only.

Leonard and I continue married.

Here we are, Leonard and I writing over the fire on a wild wet night.

The autumn is much better, how about a crumpet in October?

You must come.

Ever your, Virginia

Ever Your, Virginia

Moments on the page where the ink darkens

You've obviously dipped your pen

A pause and a return.

A breath.

Stains on the blue paper

Where has this letter been?

What file was this stored in?   What cabinet? Dark wood, thick knobs, a rusting metal key hole? What dusty room? What trips across the sea?

I sit here. Trying to imagine the smell of the room where you wrote. Where the letter sat its envelope in a file.

My best friend Eleza gave me this book six years ago. For my birthday.  

I note brackets

Places where I've made dots in the margins

Marking moments

I wonder at each mark

Why that section and not others?

Where was I?

Where did I sit?

Who was I in love with?

It ended in a transcendental theory which allowed her to believe, or say that she believed with all her scepticism, that since our apparitions, that part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death.   perhaps perhaps.

Perhaps perhaps

As I touch these letters

The unseen parts of you

Still remain

And connect with mine.

Those days when I have trouble. when I have terrible thoughts. It helps to think of you. Of the space between us not being so far.

Did you have a favorite tree too? You mention trees so often in your writing. Or perhaps I just I notice the trees.

But that somehow on the ebb and flow of things

She survived, . . .  

She being part,

She was positive,

Of the trees at home,

Of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was,

Part of the people she had never met,

Being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best,

Who lifted her on their branches,

As she had seen the trees lift the mist,

But it spread ever so far, her life, her self (Woolf 9).

I find such hope in that. How far have I spread?

The grip of numbing winter was loosened, the frozen ground had thawed, the sun was shining, the air was soft, violets and primroses were pushing their heads in the woods. The woods lay just on the other side of the road; when we went out on our walks, as soon as we had crossed it we were allowed   to break out of file and run about as we chose, pick flowers or play games. How beautiful the woods were! (Olivia 22).

Shift. Put on the sweater. Collect stones in my pockets.

I remember I was to have tea that afternoon

With Dorothy

And I received word that she was not able to make it, which was,

In a way, a blessing, because I felt upon waking a deep dreading of my own presence in this house, almost as if a heavy brick lay upon my chest, my quilt felt oppressively weighted down, my own limbs immobile, my heart thick with emptiness. Another bout of illness to contend with.

Even the garden seemed useless and small; my eyes could only fix on the tree out the window and occasional movement of squirrel or pigeon. Mostly my eyes remained tightly shut. Sleep seemed the only remedy.

Takes off sweater.

(She wished Dorothy would walk in but she never came. Each time the door would open, such anticipation, coupled with such dread.)

There were different words then.

Ill

Bedridden

Nerves

Lunatic

Hysterical

A different language

A silent one

How do I dance "heavy"?

How do I dance "ill"?

Virginia had breakdowns

During which she'd attempt suicide

Fluvial

            River processes

Life moves

Time passes

And you pick things up along the way

Things attach themselves to you

Make you heavier or more full

Or more alive

                        Change your course

By making a new curve, a new angle,

The river turns

            Around a bend made of

                        Sedimentary rock

                                    Worn smooth by time     

Each rock finds a home for a time

Then a storm comes, floods, and the stone moves

                        Now more smoothly worn

Fluvial processes

            Never stop.

Creeks look calm but

            Really they are

            Thick with life and

            Weight

Rocks in my pockets

            Drawing me further

Along the process

            To find

                        A resting place

                                    For now.

                                    It never works.

                                    The rocks aren't heavy enough.

                                    Somehow I can still

                                    Find my way up and

out.

Rolling across the floor.

Then there was a more passive, a more languorous state, when I seemed to myself, dissolving, which I let myself go, as I phrased it to myself, when I felt as though I were floating luxuriously down a warm, gentle river, every muscle relaxed, every portion of me open to receive each softest caress of air and water, down, down towards some unknown delicious sea (Olivia 77).

Touching your letters now

I wish I could talk to you

Could say: there's a little bit of you in me now

Your life still on this paper

            Seeps

                        Into my skin

How spectacular to know you this way

Like a secret

My secret

No one else here to read with me

As I sit at the large wooden table in the reading room

At the HRC

Quiet sanctuary.

And only I hear your voice

As I read

Imagine you seated at your large wooden desk

In your room

(of your own)

Bright sun across the dark wood

A musty smell

A dusty pen

A shawl behind you

The window open at your back,

The garden outside full

With color and smells

Your favorite

The

Lilacs

Are

Blooming

White

Purple

Blue

How do I dance

            A lilac bush?

(lilacs are my favorite actually)

(that's my secret)

Parts of you on this paper

In your words

In the garden

In the river

            Certainly

            Certainly

You became what you always wrote about.

            Something unseen

That attaches itself

I wish I knew what your voice sounded like

            Really

And I wish I knew your sense of humor

            Sometimes you write

In your letters

            With a hostility

            I can only assume

            Is sarcastic

With a subtle wry

Dryness

To those who knew you best

I have

no idea

            what that

kind of

comfort

really was for you

But I can imagine

Dorothy

            Like a need . . .

Tea fills in for so

much

Once a year meeting

Alone

In the garden

And yet

Dorothy Strachey Bussy

Author of Olivia

doesn't make it into

the your biography

but in mention of her being the "odd, clever, ugly" sister of Lytton (Lee 205).

            And in then that Virginia sat next to her once at a party, asking her excitedly about her life (Lee 270).

(What will people remember of me? I don't have many letters

Emails have changed the evidence of my life.

What would be missing from my biography?

How many touches, skin to skin, how many moments unwritten? People, voices, breaths, whose influence on me has gone unnoted.

Love has always been the chief business of my life, the only thing I have thought - no, felt - supremely worthwhile (Olivia 8-9).

Grey

rolling

Slow walk

Labored breath

Backward glance

Upward glance

Downward glance

Embrace

Yellow green

Wrapping

Writing

Gardening

Digging

The sea--waves

Quick steps on pavement

A head covered with a blanket

Playing with a stone in a pocket

Drinking tea

Pouring tea

Licking an envelope

Licking a stamp

Putting on glasses

Dipping a pen

Taking a pill

Warming hands at the fire

Warm laughter

Holding a hand

Meg then goes through each one of these--in suggested movements/gestures, silently after reading them. A choreographed dance. Repeat. Repeat.

Monday 24 March, 1941

A curious seaside feeling in the air today. Everyone leaning against the wind, nipped and silenced. All pulp removed.

This windy corner. And Nessa is in Brighton, & I am imagining how it wd be if we were to infuse souls.

L. is doing the rhododendrons.

The text of Virginia Woolf's last diary entry plays on a tape recorder until there is only static. Meg continues to dance through the static.

Lights down.