Letters to Milena

by Franz Kafka

Oh yes, to be close to you…Otherwise I have too much to do to just lie in the sanatorium, be fed, and stare up at the eternal reproach of the winter sky.

I have been overcome by the nothingness I once described.

Sometimes when one wakes up in the morning one thinks that truth is right next to the bed, like an open grave with a few wilted flowers, ready to receive.

Whenever I write to you sleep is out of the question,

I was reading my destiny inside your eyes without knowing it

I started running as fast as I could and still could not escape the thought: “If only I could take her with me!” and the counterthought: “But can there be any darkness where she resides?”

Aren’t our eyes made to be torn out, and our hearts for the same purpose?

Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most—you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love.

I’m not saying goodbye. There isn’t any goodbye, unless gravity, which is lying in wait for me, pulls me down entirely. But how could it, since you are alive.

Perhaps their strength to love consists solely in their ability to be loved.

Why, Milena, do you write about our common future which will never be, or is that why you write about it?

The thought of death makes you anxious? I’m just terribly afraid of pain. That’s a bad sign. To want death but not pain is a bad sign.

(Sometimes I don’t understand how people came across the concept of “fun”; it was probably only abstracted as an opposite to sadness.)

You write that you have no hope, but you do have the hope of being able to leave me completely.

Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost,

The evil magic of letter writing is setting in and destroying my nights, even more than they are already destroying themselves.

I have to stop, I can no longer write.

Please let’s not write ...

Of course one cannot even figure out one’s own riddles; this is precisely the meaning of “fear.”

Dear Milena, a piece of a letter has been lying here ready for you such a long time, but I am unable to finish it, for the old grief, the old pain has found me here as well, attacked me and knocked me down a little.