Ted Hughes's Letter to Sylvia Plath (by Ana Fialho and Bárbara Borges)

Dear Sivvy,

Time goes by slowly when you’re lonely. Your child has now seen April Snowdrops, Indian Pipes, everything that was grand or classical, but, my dear, his sky is sometimes without a star. I too see it has none now. Under his eyes there are marks of one who is troubled yet, underneath his worry, underneath his tumultuous anxious gaze lie those dark clear ingenuous eyes, its light sometimes dimmer, sometimes dazzling, sometimes sparking.

Mystery still haunts me as I wonder what it was that made you wring and wring your hands, your body? My dear, how was he not a star in our bedroom’s ceiling?

He is a wrinkled stalk, she is too, I am a stalk stepped on, trampled, cut. You were and we still are in this zoo waiting patiently for colours and ducks. I forever wonder where you were, they forever wonder who you were. 

My dear, I regret how the events turned out. Yesterday, I received a strange package with the date 12^th February 1963. Inside, a peculiar letter said the following:

Dear Mrs. Plath,

Once upon a time I was dead too. I did not need to try to be dead. I was dead. Twice for that matter. My brain slowly deconstructed itself and as time passed the emptiness invaded my soul. I was weak, at that time. So fragile that the thinnest drop of water would fill me up like the ocean.

The world looked at me as if I was already the corpse, as if my blood had stopped running and my body was starting to smell like the river bottom, dark green algae, still in space and time. I kept very still, I waited. I waited so long I learned how to become the Berlin Wall. I was the Berlin Wall. I am a wasted Berlin Wall. At a young age I was dead. I survived not to tell the story. Multitudes gathered around not to look at me, though I was dead. And people like seeing the dead. But, like I said, I survived.

I am now old. Too old to live the life that was set out for me. I am an old, quiet woman, I am still. I do not bother the world. The world breathes without me. Two decades in and is now time to see the dead. To feel the dead. I imagined you immortal, at least as mortal as me. You surprised me, I do not believe.

It is indeed “the theatrical”. I was melting, I was dying and people moved along me, didn’t see me, and I saw them. But it wasn’t about me. It still isn’t. It’s about you, who died, and me, who fights to be alive again. It’s about me, the Lady Lazarus. To be.

Yours,

Lady Lazarus, to be.

You can imagine my surprise to read such accounts, which, I suppose, could not complete their purpose. They seem so ironic now that you are gone. I fancy that perhaps if they had reached your hands, if they had been sent a day earlier, they could have saved you. They could have stopped what I could not. 

Questioning, wondering,