LOVE LETTER: Vita Sackville-West to Violet Keppel

Last night was perfection. It was Hell leaving you today.
God how I adore you and want you. You can’t know how much. I exult in my surrender.
I am so proud of you, my sweet, I revel in your beauty, your form and feature.
You asked me point blank why I love you. It's because I’ve fought so hard to win you.
I love you because you never capitulate, your wonderful intelligence, for your literary aspirations,
and I love you because you have the air of doubting nothing!
I love in you what is also in me: imagination, the gift for languages, taste, intuition and a host of other things
I love you, Vita, because I have seen your soul.

All today I was incoherent. I tell you, there is a barbaric splendor about you that conquered not only me,
but everyone who saw you. You are made to conquer, not be conquered. You could have the world at your feet.
I miss you so.  I love belonging to you — I glory in it. You alone have bent me to your will.
You shattered my self-possession, robbed me of my mystery, made me yours.
I never thought I would (or could) love like this.
You and I, were born 2000 years too late, or 2000 years too soon.

My days are consumed by this impotent longing for you, and my nights are riddled with insufferable dreams.
I want you. I want you hungrily, frenziedly, passionately.  I try so hard to imagine your lips on mine.
I am starving for you. Not only the physical you, but your fellowship, your sympathy, the innumerable points of view we share.
I can’t exist without you, you are my affinity, my twin spirit. We complete each other.
God knows we have waited long enough.
I want to go away with you. I must and will and damn the world and damn the consequences and anyone
had better look out for themselves who dares to become an obstacle in my path.

Nothing and no one in the world could kill the love I have for you.
I have given you my body time after time to treat as you pleased, to tear in pieces if such had been your will.
There isn’t a recess in my brain into which you haven’t penetrated.
I have clung to you and caressed you and slept with you. You are my lover and I am your mistress, and kingdoms and empires
and governments have tottered and succumbed before now to that mighty combination — the most powerful in the world.
Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be a suffragette, be anything you like,but for pity’s sake live fully.

Live passionately, live disastrously if necessary.
Live the gamut of human experiences, build, destroy, build up again!
Cast aside the drab garments of respectability and convention, my beautiful Bird of Paradise,
they become you not. Lead the life Nature intended you to lead.