To Helga With No Conclusions

Helga Crane,
I want to say that I know you because you have in some way led me to feel like
I know myself but to say this would reduce you and all that you are and were and
will be. Has this not been the issue which dominated your existence— the
insistence by others that they could in some way know and contain you? And
who perpetrates this more than men? I am wholly familiar with this repulsion of
men and their commitment to loving you without knowing you. I feel that
throughout your life you were painted over and over by many different colors
but none of them fully suited you.
It was written that you are sensitive to atmosphere. Do you feel perpetually
malleable, unable to be anything but situated within your current environment?
Are you maybe afraid of importance because you have for so long been what
others have decided you are, so that if you are nothing to them you are nothing
to yourself? Have you maybe realized that we will always be clutching shadows
and missing actualities because the actuality has never been?
You love attention and visibility. Does this maybe seem like you are always
putting on a show that has never been for you? Yet you also seem to be
constantly watching a show— partially outside of every environment you enter
and consuming it as a spectacle.
Do you feel that you will ever arrive at what you are moving towards? Or maybe
movement has been what you are moving towards, maybe you just want to be
infinitely oscillatory. In this way I hope you never arrive and are never consumed by
what seems to have consumed everyone around you. And in this way I also hope this
letter does not conclude anything for you because your life should never be concluded
or resolved.