Dying Inside

Take an imaginary letter, Mr. Selig. Harrumph. Miss Kitty Holstein, Something West Sixty-something Street, New York City. Check the address later. Don’t bother about the zipcode.

Dear Kitty:

I know you haven’t heard from me in ages but I think now it’s appropriate to try to get in touch with you again. Thirteen years have passed and a certain maturity must have come over both of us, I think, healing old wounds and making communication possible. Despite all hard feelings that may once have existed between us I never lost my fondness for you, and you remain bright in my mind.

Speaking of my mind, there’s something I ought to tell you. I no longer do things very well with it. By “things” I mean the mental thing, the mindreading trick, which of course I couldn’t do on you in any case, but which defined and shaped my relationship to everybody else in the world. This power seems to be slipping away from me now. It caused us so much grief, remember? It was what ultimately split us up, as I tried to explain in my last letter to you, the one you never answered. In another year or so — who knows, six months, a month, a week? — it will be totally gone and I will be just an ordinary human being, like yourself. I will be a freak no longer. Perhaps then there will be an opportunity for us to resume the relationship that was interrupted in 1963 and to reestablish it on a more realistic footing.

I know I did dumb things then. I pushed you mercilessly. I refused to accept you for yourself, and tried to make something else out of you, something freakish, in fact, something just like myself. I had good reasons in theory for attempting that, I thought then, but of course they were wrong, they had to be wrong, and I never saw that until it was too late. To you I seemed domineering, overpowering, dictatorial — me, mild self-effacing me! Because I was trying to transform you. And eventually I bored you. Of course you were very young then, you were — shall I say it? — shallow, unformed, and you resisted me. But now that we’re both adults we might be able to make a go of it.

I hardly know what my life will be like as an ordinary human being unable to enter minds. Right now I’m floundering, looking for definitions of myself, looking for structures. I’m thinking seriously of entering the Roman Catholic Church. (Good Christ, am I? That’s the first I’ve heard of that! The stink of incense, the mumble of priests, is that what I want?) Or perhaps the Episcopalians, I don’t know. It’s a matter of affiliating myself with the human race. And also I want to fall in love again. I want to be part of someone else. I’ve already begun tentatively, timidly getting in touch with my sister Judith again, after a whole lifetime of warfare; we’re starting to relate to each other for the first time, and that’s encouraging to me. But I need more: a woman to love, not just sexually but in all ways. I’ve really had that only twice in my life, once with you, once about five years later with a girl named Toni who wasn’t very much like you, and both times this power of mine ruined things, once because I got too close with it, once because I couldn’t get close enough. As the power slips away from me, as it dies, perhaps there’s a chance for an ordinary human relationship between us at last, of the kind that ordinary human beings have all the time. For I will be ordinary. For I will be very ordinary.

I wonder about you. You’re 35 years old now, I think. That sounds very old to me, even though I’m 41. (41 doesn’t sound old, somehow!) I still think of you as being 22. You seemed even younger than that: su