"Letters to Eliza" is a tale of love. Letter No. 20

Eliza,
It seems to you that you know everything about despair: what it tastes like, its weight, and the fact that once it comes, it never lets go, leaving scars and cuts on the skin. You are just very tired. This fatigue envelops you in a suffocating layer of sadness, pushes you into empty cinemas to watch films in which there is not a word of truth, but only one longing. Fatigue whispers in your ear about the impossible, which could be yours, stop listening. You live along the same route, a breathless bus carries you, through a dusty window you look at the gray streets, you smile tightly, kiss out of politeness and even love out of despair. You confuse fatigue with despair. Despair is different. It is the color of war and weighs all maternal tears. Believe me, Eliza, you don't know it. Every time you insist that you can't do it anymore, deep inside you know that you can, that you can do much more than this day, than this next disappointment, that you can, and moreover, you will go further in whatever became. Fatigue is just a bad lingering dream that leaves behind a headache, but it's just a dream. Despair brings you to your knees, hits you mercilessly, to the blood, but does not kill. Despair is someone else's death, and that's why it is so unbearable. Why am I writing all this to you? It saddens me to look at you, Eliza. I am sad to hear your stories full of sorrow. I am sad to write to you. I'm just sad. In these minutes, I begin to lose you, your face becomes blurred, as if I were looking at him through a window, tear-stained with autumn rain. Come on, Eliza. Remember that this is just a dream, that you always, hear, you can always choose to wake up.

Anastasia Volkhovskaya