It’s awful to write to you because, even though I love writing to you, it brings you so near me I could almost touch you and I know at the same time that I cannot touch you, you are so far away in cold, unkind Ringwood and I am in stale Barnet in a roadhouse pub with nothing but your absence and your distance, to keep my heart company.
I think of you always all the time. I kiss my uncharitable pillow for you in the nasty nights. I can see you with our little Mongolian monkey at your breast; I can see you in that unfond house listening with loathing to the News; I can see you in bed, more lovely than anything that has ever been at all. I love you. I love Llewelyn & Aeronwy, but you above all and forever until the sun stops and even after that.
And I cannot come down this weekend. I have to work all day Sunday. I am working, for the first time since I sold my immortal soul, very very hard, doing three months’ work in a week. I hate film studios. I hate film workers. I hate films. There is nothing but glibly naive insecurity in this huge tinroofed box of tricks. I do not care a bugger about the Problems of Wartime Transport. All I know is that you are my wife, my lover, my joy, my Caitlin.
But Cat darling I miss you too much to bear.
Come Back on Wednesday. I’ll send you another inarticulately loving letter tomorrow, with some money. You should have it by Saturday morning. No, it’s better that I wire the money so that you can have it for the weekend. Even though I dislike Blashford very much, I envy it because all my love is there with my children and with you.
Come back on Wednesday. Please.
I haven’t been in London at all as I have to start working unlikelily early in the morning & carry on until six o’clock.
I love you more, even, than when I said I loved you only a few seconds ago.
I think I can get Vera a little part in this film: a tiny part as a pudding-faced blonde sloth but I shan’t tell her that.
Write to me telling me two things: that you love me & that you are coming back on Wednesday which is like a day full of birds & bells.
I am writing on the back of a script by Mr J. B. Priestley. But that doesn’t spoil what I have to say to you. I have to say to you that I love you in life & after death, and that even though I drink I am good. I am not drinking much. I am too lonely even for that.
Write.
Give my love to the pigmy baby & kiss Llewelyn on the forehead for me.
Touch your own body for me, very gently. On the breast & your belly. My Caitlin.
Your
Dylan
X
— Dylan Thomas, from the book The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas (borrow free)
