My dearest Ekaterina,
What pleasure there may be in the writing of a name! As my pen traces the delicate contours, every letter sings, and when amalgamated in the appropriate fashion, the chorus makes incarnate the very essence of the one whom I most fervently love - Ekaterina…
The glacial winter draws on apace here in Puerto Natales, and an almost imperceptibly thin sheet of snow has iced our fields, apparent by the light crunch beneath my boots in early morning promenades (and, thereafter, by fields' icy appearance). Vast and desolate, I could almost pretend that I was with you, in the plains of far-off Ulan Ude; but I am a world away from there. Literally.
Here, 12,750km from you (as the chinchilla digs), the guano trade has slowed, and the factory of my parents and grandparents has all but fallen into the most unseemly disrepair. I can scarce afford to eat, let alone purchase fuel for the hearth by which to warm myself. But I endure: for I have a flame within, and may be made alight at the very thought of you. You are my warmth, Ekaterina - and if your heat may be felt here, at the extremity of your absence, what feverish temperatures must afflict the rest of this world, enflamed, and furnace-like by your fiery presence!
I jest, of course, but still I feel the thoroughness of your not being here, like tall flames piercing my soul (though these flames are not to be confused with the flame of warmth you give me, which is comfort). O, heartless distance! That I should wake every morning to plant my feet on this good Chilean ground, and know that these same feet diametrically oppose your own, on the far side of this great spheroid - why, it is enough to drive a man mad. I mean, long distance relationships are difficult at the best of times, but when I reflect that the most direct route to one another entails passing through the centre of a 5,430°C core of molten iron-nickel alloy (more heat, though now literal) - those are the times that really get me down.
Ah, what a bitter irony it is, that I should live further from my love than any other soul on this earth! There's a poetry in it, I'm sure - but I am too coarse, too blunt and doltish to write it. I feel only the dull, stupid pain of a simple village farmer, O woe is me… Alack!
And so my blind indignation rises within me - like the Bulgan forests from the steppes, like the Andes from the sea. But passion in the forgotten is so much dukkah, thrown to the wind. My feeble glow will fade long before the Siberian night, as I fall short of all that I have dreamed; but as long as there remains distance left to run, still shall I breathe your name, and trace its silent echoes.
Devotedly,
J
