Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia.
I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone:
I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.
You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it.
And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap.
But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality.
Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.
So this letter is just really a squeal of pain.
It is incredible how essential to me you have become.
I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things.
Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this—But oh my dear,
I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.
 You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love.
 I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses.
And I don’t really resent it.

-Vita