Since you left, I have found, in my mailbox, two missives on the last two consecutive days. I receive them with mysterious mixed feelings. I picture a voice far far off in a cold yet somehow green country, a voice attached to breasts and legs I have touched, and I feel both a kind of jealousy and a sense of your absence – as though you weren’t really standing over neolithic remains or travelling in a car full of vomit, as though you hadn’t gone from here to somewhere but from here to nowhere. At night I miss you in my bed, your arms, your warmth; but I also recognize that when you are here it can never be like that – just us. It has never been just us. But I want to sleep with you as I write this – perhaps that is enough. I am thinking especially of the you that never seems to accompany me. That you all decked out for one of your lady friends in one of your own evening arrangements – bow tie, purple shorts, white shirt. Mildly erotic, light, very clean. I’ve been trying to remember the you that we got to share, particularly your look in the morning when you wake up. All I can see is that cute face you pull, a kind of scrunched up, squinting look when you don’t want to get up. And you wonder why I like to fuck in the mornings! I can’t resist you, when you are lying on your stomach, and I can see your white warm tits pressed onto the mattress beneath you. There is a kind of extraordinary innocence which is suspended around us, or you, in those first few moments, or seconds. We must try and pay more attention to them. Like the thought of who will get up and make an egg or some coffee. But of course we’ve never really had that because of others in the apartment, or because we get up at different times, or because we become careless and indifferent towards these moments which can be so gladdening if given the proper attention.

Que ce que c’est you’re having a "fucking good time." I hope the world isn’t going to turn you into more of a ‘curser’ than you already are. But I’m glad you’re having a great time. You seem somehow energized by the experience of travel, which is encouraging – we shall see. Everything you do becomes important (as I found it) when you get back. Everything stays with you, and becomes twice as wonderful as it is now, so do as much as you can. Life is short. Remember the details of things. They are still the most satisfying to me. I remember specifically a piece of that hard toast they serve in Ireland and a painting that was hung on a slant – both from my first morning of the first trip – everything stays.

What’s up with me? Well, on Monday I’ll be going to Strat-ford with Cameron to see Blithe Spirit. I’m really falling in love with this guy. He’s incredible – he has his peculiarities, as we all do (especially myself) but as I have said before he is so calm and reassuring. He has been a great support to me in your absence and so I can’t imagine these days without him. Luckily he has not been averse to my company either so we have been spending a lot of time together. One anxiety has arisen out of all this, however. He is beginning to flirt with Sarah (yes, your Sarah!). Cameron doesn’t seem to want to talk about it, but their goodnight kisses at the end of evenings we all spend together are becoming of a rather awkward duration (just like yours and hers did!!). I have no quarrel with their relationship (you might though!!!) except that it would eventually draw him from me – as I suppose must ultimately happen. We talk about fags and queers all the time now and I tease him by telling him how gay he looks. He usually isn’t amused (in a humourous way). Strangely enough, I have no desire to go to bed with him – I just want him always close.

During one of our evenings, we had a wonderful birthday party for T.S. Eliot. We had a big cake with "Happy 94th Tom" spelled on the top, and an expensive bottle of wine. We went to one of the Record Rooms at Hart House and quietly listened to an old recording of Eliot reading his poems and then Tim pulled out an edition of The Collected Works. We began to read the play The Family Reunion – all of us using different voices and having the greatest of laughs over it. I sang some of my parts in my baritone voice and was so thrilled to gain the compliments of everybody. This Saturday is Wallace Stevens’ birthday and I have bought a small bottle of bubbly and hope to celebrate it quietly in my own room. Stevens will read on his record if he is feeling up to it.

I got your third letter, though I can’t imagine how that shoddy stamping job made it by the post officers. If you are going to use used stamps, don’t tape them from the bottom. It looks too obvious. So tell me, how is your new romance with Kath-arine? Are you getting any action? Or is there someone else of the gentlemanly variety at your service? I can’t imagine but that there is. I know Irish men are a bit slow, but it is only a matter of time before they will latch on to a good thing. I miss you. I don’t really feel like writing dirty things, so my missing you must be something different. Oh, all right, maybe just one: THE STIFF RED PENIS PLUNGED INTO THE RED WET HOLE. Yawn.

Interestingly, I have been dreaming a great deal of Clive lately. Always, he is coming into a scene where I do not expect him (except once where I was at his new house). He is so kind to me and filled with sadness. I always know (as one simply comes to know certain things in a dream) that he misses me and wants so badly for things to be as they were when we lived together. But he doesn’t say so – he asks me how I am now that I’m heterosexual and his voice is filled with regret and emptiness. I awake on these mornings in a kind of sickness that is incommunicable. I will never see him again. I feel I did the right thing (although in a cruel and unfair way) but when I think that I shall never see the dog, or the stairs, or the rug, or my study with the tall books, or Clive ever again, I am practically stunned with anguish. Everything passes and everything is forgotten, but I want somehow to make it better for him and for me, to say I’m sorry in a way that could make life possible for him again. I am greedy and I want us somehow to be secret souls – but he is lost to me and he will carry me with him always, as a broken thing he cannot fix. I miss him.