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For You, who teach me devotion by accepting me!

I slept wonderfully because I curled up and imagined you putting your arms around me. This idea alone filled me with a feeling of warmth and security. It’s better to be with you, of course, but I can imagine what it’s like to be with you because I got to experience it. If I hadn’t been allowed to experience it, I wouldn’t even have an idea about it. This has nothing to do with frugality or the famous saying ‘Let’s just make the best of the situation’, but rather with the desire to bridge this time in the best possible way, this time that it still takes until you get these three things that you still have to do has passed and you join me.

Maybe today is finally the day, because it is the third day of my trip, and you have three things to do. Maybe each of these things will take a day, although then they would be bigger things and not just little things, as I would have guessed when you announced it. Why didn’t I ask you what those three things were? Why did I have to show off my pride by pretending I didn’t care? Of course I didn’t care, quite the opposite. By pretending I didn’t care, I assumed you noticed. I didn’t mean it that way. You should notice what I want. Actually, a completely absurd request!

Still, it happens again and again. Why do we actually talk to each other if we hope that what we don’t say will come true? There have been times when, as an outsider, I have wondered about such absurdities in other relationships. At the time I thought to myself that something like that would never happen to me, because after all it can’t be that hard to say what I want. In the meantime, I have learned and know that it is not that simple, which does not reduce the absurdity and does not turn a wrong into a right. Too many false considerations guide us and lead us to such reactions. What would have been so difficult about simply asking what kind of things you have to do and how long you estimate it will take to complete them?

I didn’t ask because I figured if you wanted to tell me, you probably would, and if you don’t say it, then you don’t want to say it. Basically, there was nothing more to it than the thought that I wouldn’t deign to ask you. Should such thoughts even find a place in a relationship that is based on love, love, trust and recognition?

Yes, I am ashamed of these thoughts now that I have decided not to mince my words towards you or myself. I missed you as much as I missed myself. The guilt clings to mine like the blood to Lady Macbeth’s hands. You may or may not forgive me, but even if you do, I still have to forgive myself. Does that sound easy? But it’s not, because I obviously judge myself much more harshly than I judge others. I think you’ll forgive me. I can almost hear it: You forgive me, but I am not satisfied with that and would like to raise objections that you immediately stop. There’s nothing more to add, you would tell me, to make it clear to me once and for all that you don’t want to talk about it anymore. You are welcome to do that too, and I will definitely take your order – and that’s all that matters – into account by not saying anything more on this topic, but you won’t be able to stop it from continuing in my mind works that I will only draw a line when I am ready.

Immediately after breakfast I set off towards Wolfsburg on a beautiful, sunny day. You probably won’t believe it, but it took me almost five hours to cover these few kilometers. Do you want to know why? No, I didn’t just dawdle or kill time in some way, on the contrary, I even perceived and experienced it as an extremely fulfilling time by completely forgetting about it and surrendering to the experience.

I saw the landscape, the trees, how they stretch tied up towards the sky, the clouds, how they move calmly across the sky, the houses, how they wait to offer people protection and shelter, and the people, how they offer theirs do daily work. I stopped again and again to capture an impression in a lasting way, with the foresight not through the eye of the camera. Because what does the camera do to us?

We think to ourselves, oh, that’s a nice motif, grab the camera, try to find the best technical setting and have long since stopped looking at the picture, at the moment that presents itself to us, that invites us to enjoy it – Alone, we do not accept the invitation. But it’s not just inanimate objects that happen to us in this way. Don’t we act just as erratically when we meet people?

Everything happens in haste. For too long I didn’t even notice it, for too long I didn’t even miss anything, until I met you, until you lured my gaze into yours, seduced me, then I couldn’t help but stay, and above all I could it because you never tried to hold me, never tried to make me something that I wasn’t, because you never created an image of me that I had to live up to, because you didn’t want to shape me.

You accepted me in what I was, what I am and what I will be. I was allowed to confide in you about what I was, what I am and what I will be. You have treated this gift, which is myself, with the utmost care. You gave me the freedom to be myself, the trust and the courage. You awakened powers in me that I didn’t even know I had. You let me be. I never want to fall behind this experience again, to be thrown back.

I wanted to go to Wolfsburg, and I got there. Understanding space means taking it in with all my senses. I walked through it. My path led me to an old castle. It was already late afternoon and despite the nice weather I found myself all alone at the defensive wall. I looked over it thoughtfully, first into the distance, in the direction I thought you were, and asked myself whether you weren’t already on your way here to me. Then I looked into the depths, a dizzying depth. And even though every fiber in me screamed to back away, I just leaned further. What would happen, I asked myself, if I fell down there now, if I stayed down there, forever calm? How long would it take for someone to notice, for you to notice? Wouldn’t it be exactly the same? No matter whether I live on or not, everyone else would live on, completely unaffected, you would live on, just as before. No, I’m not doing you an injustice because I want you to continue living the same way you did before, regardless of whether I’m alive or not. It shouldn’t matter – but, of course, I wish it did matter, that it would leave an impression on you if I left. No, I don’t want you to be sad or even unhappy about it, just that you think of me every now and then, that you like to think of me, of me and the moments of us that we were able to experience together. That’s everything, really everything, that I want.

In the end, however, I left it with the thought experiment; the hope was too great that you would still come, when you would have done your three things, when you would be ready to come to me. I walked away from the wall and retreated to the room I had taken. The sun was slowly setting. I looked out into the gently reddening evening sky.

How long did I sit there like that? I don’t know, because I dreamed, dreamed of you coming in here at the door, finally, but I listened in vain, dreamed of you taking me in your arms like you did on our first night. Can you still remember this, our first night?

We had probably already experienced many nights of love by then – why should we make a secret of it? And yet this night was a very special one. What made her so special? Anything we did? Probably not, because there can’t be any major differences in the mechanical process. No, it was something completely different, something that seemed like magic and yet seemed so simple. Do you notice how I’m searching for words for something that ultimately cannot be described but can only be experienced? Do you notice how I’m once again wrestling with the limitations and limitations of our language? The right word would probably be devotion, or at least an attempt at rapprochement.

When you touch me, when you kiss me, when I stroke my fingers over your skin, when my lips are allowed to taste you, then it becomes very quiet in my head and I lose the world around me, because everything I can perceive are you. You become my world – all I am, in this moment, is feeling you, smelling you, tasting you. All I want, in this moment, is to open myself to you, to take you into me, as if there were no before and no after, as if the world had stopped, in this moment, for our sake, and time. You taught me to entrust myself, to give myself up, without forethought or consideration. It is so incredibly liberating to be able to shed the attitude of having to fulfill expectations other than the one thing of being completely yourself and completely you. It’s so comforting not to have to pretend, but to know that I am accepted for who I am.

There, as in every other encounter with you, I was able to experience this uniqueness of acceptance, and this also results in my fear of not seeing you again, my fear that you won’t come after all, because I will measure every further experience, every further encounter by this – which one could withstand this dimension?

Now it has finally been said. Yes, I’m afraid. I wanted to be confident about it, I wanted to remember what we were able to experience and not let myself be dragged down by what will happen, or better yet, what could happen. I want to stay and yet I’m leaving again. Fear is paralyzing, whereas trust is invigorating. I want to have trust.

Tomorrow morning or later, it doesn’t matter, I’ll leave to spend the next day and night in Klagenfurt. The tower clock strikes midnight. It’s late. I am tired. If I knew that you were coming now, that you were coming this night… But I don’t know. I can only wish for it. I don’t have any more left. No more, and yet everything that can ever be to me.

From the One to whom You teach devotion by accepting me.

Go to the fifth letter here.