'The hills darken'

The world has lost a poet.

Oct 15, 2023

Dear friends,

I can finally cry again.

Saturday morning, when the downpour was smashing against the windows, I doom scrolled Facebook to dilute myself from a muddy pond of bad thoughts, just to find out Louise Glück was dead.

The news thumped my chest with unbearable moroseness. I collapsed onto the corner of the bed, unable to stop weeping.

One Louise Glück’s poem concluded like this:

“Life is very weird, no matters how it ends,

very filled with dreams. Never

will I forget your face, your frantic human eyes

swollen with tears.

I thought my life was over and my heart was broken.

Then I moved to Cambridge.”

I read Glück whenever I desperately missed someone. A person who spent early years of his adulthood in Cambridge.

I wondered whether he had seen Charles River the way I saw it.

Did he ever take a stroll across Harvard Bridge? I don’t know.

The feelings are forever too strong and I am forever too weak.

Have you ever felt the presentiment of loss?

Even before you really own something, you’re already horrified by the scenario that it too will soon slip away?

It was ironic that I had not been able to shed a tear for too long, I should have been happy to sob once again.

Glück, when I went to Cambridge, the person had already moved West.

I know I still think of him, now and then. Why should I care about Nobel Chemistry?

I’m very much enraged, by myself, but mostly, by the unspeakable detachment, heartstrings that have never been tied and a condition of coming to a strange city chasing for remnants of old days when our paths had not collided, just yet.

I’ve re-entered therapy, just so you know.

How should I end this letter to you?

Is it simple we just leave it here and pick it up later?

Well, another poem by Glück for you, my dear:

“Long ago, I was wounded. I lived

to revenge myself

against my father, not

for what he was —

for what I was: from the beginning of time,

in childhood, I thought

that pain meant

I was not loved.