All these soft, warm nights going to waste when I ought to be lying in your arms under the moon - the dearest arms in all the world - darling arms that I love to feel around me - How much longer - before they’ll be here to stay? When I do get home again, you’ll certainly have a most awful time ever moving me one inch from you -
March 1919O Lover, lover you are mine - and before long - I’ll be coming to you because you are my darlin’ husband and I am
Your Wife -
March 1919I don’t see how you can carry around as much love as I’ve given you -
March 1919I’ll come to you, Lover, when you’re ready - Don't - don’t ever think of the things you can’t give me. You’ve trusted me with the dearest heart of all - and it’s so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had -
March 1919We ought to be together in the Spring - It seems made for us to love in -
I am so proud to be your girl - to have everybody know we are in love. It's so good to know you're always loving me - and that before long we'll be together for all our lives -
March 1919All the broken columns and clasped hands and faces and angels mean romances - and in a hundred years I think I shall like having young people speculate on whether my eyes were brown or blue - of course, they are neither - I hope my grave has an air of many, many years ago about it.
April 1919I do - hope I get a letter tomorrow - and
I do - love you with all my heart.
June 1919And so you see, Scott, I'll never be able to do anything because I'm much too lazy to care whether it's done or not - and I don't want to be famous and fêted - all I want is to be very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own - to live and be happy and die in my own way - to please myself. And, Scott, Darlin' don't try so hard to convince yourself that we're very old people who've lost their most precious possession. We really haven't found it yet - and only weaklings like the St. Paul girl you told me about who lack courage and the power to feel they're right when the whole world says they're wrong, ever lose - All the fire and sweetness - the emotional strength that we're capable of is growing - growing and just because sanity and wisdom are growing too and we're building our love-castle on a firm foundation, nothing is lost - That first abandon couldn't last, but the things that went to make it are tremendously alive - just like blowing bubbles - they burst but more bubbles just as beautiful can be blown - and burst - til the soap and water is gone - and that's the way we'll be, I guess - so don't mourn for a poor little forlorn, wonderful memory when we've got each other - Because I know I love you - and you'll come in January to tell me that you do - and we won't worry any more about anything - Zelda Fall 1919
I love you, Darling Scott, and you love me, and we can be thankful for that anyway - Thanks for the book - I don’t like it - Zelda Sayre March 1920
Do not feel that you have any obligations toward me, sentimental or otherwise, unless you accept them as freely as you did when I was young and happy and quite different from how I am now.
Summer 1930I would like you to understand clearly why there are certain scenes not only towards the end which could never be effaced from my mind. I am here, and since I have no choice, I will try to muster the grace to rest peacefully as I should, but our divergence is too great - as you must realize - for us to ever be anything except a hash together; and since we have never found either help or satisfaction in each other, the best thing is to seek it separately.
June 1930You will have all the things you want without me, and I will find something. You will have some nice girl who will not care about the things I cared about and you will be happier.
June 1930There will be Sundays and Mondays again, which are different from each other, and there will be Christmas and winter fires and pleasant things to think of when you’re going to sleep - and my life won’t be up the back-stairs of music halls and yours won’t keep trailing down the gutters of Paris - if it will only work, and I can keep sane and not a bitter maniac -
I will be so glad to see you - I hope most of the poison will be gone by then.
Please be good, Dear. It’s so much better to love the things you’ve always loved if you can just remember about them.
August 1930There’s no justice - no quiet place of rest left in the world, and the longer I have to bear this the meaner and harder and sicker I get -
August/September 1930I wonder why we have never been very happy and why all this has happened - It was much nicer a long time ago when we had each other and the space about the world was warm - Can’t we get it back someway - even by imagining?
Fall 1930Living is cold and technical without you, a death mask of itself.
-
And you are a darling and it must be awful to have a person always trying to creep inside you the way I do -
Good-night, my Sweet Love -
Zelda
Fall 1930I don’t know how we’re going to reverse time, you and me; erase and begin again - but I imagine it will be automatic. I can’t project myself into the past no matter how hard I try. There are lots of days when I think it would have been better to give me a concise explanation and let it go - because I know so much already. One illusion is as good as another.
Write me how you are and what you do and what the world is like at Caux -
Love Zelda
Fall 1930I woke up this morning and the sun was lying like a birth-day parcel on my table so I opened it up and so many happy things went fluttering into the air.
The moon slips into the mountains like a lost penny and the fields are black and pungent and I want you near so that I could touch you in the autumn stillness even a little bit like the last echo of summer. The horizon lies over the road to Lausanne and the succulent fields like a guillotine and the moon bleeds over the water and you are not so far away that I can’t smell your hair in the drying breeze. Darling - I love these velvet nights. I’ve never been able to decide whether the night was a bitter enemy or a “grand patron” - or whether I love you most in the eternal classic half-lights where it blends with day, or in the full religious fan-fare of mid-night, or perhaps in the lux of noon.
Dear. Are you sort of feeling aimless, surprised, and looking rather reproachful that no melo-drama comes to pass when your work is over - as if you had ridden very hard with a message to save your army and found that the enemy had decided not to attack - the way you sometimes feel - or are you just a darling little boy with a holiday on his hands in the middle of the week - the way you sometimes are - or are you organizing and dynamic and mending things - the way you sometimes are -
I love you - the way you always are.
Dear -
Good-night -
Dear-dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear dear
Dear dear dear dear dear dear.
Fall 1930
No communication will ever improve upon the handwritten letter.