Franz Kafka Love Letter to Milena Jesenska

http://www.links2love.com/love_letters_3.htm                     1921        No, Milena, I beg you once again to invent another possibility for my writing to you. You mustn't go to the post office in vain, even your little postman--who is he?--mustn't do it, nor should even the postmistress be asked unnecessarily. If you can find no other possibility, then one must put up with it, but at least make a little effort to find one. Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire. Remembering that one extinguished fire with clothing, I took an old coat and beat you with it. But again the transmutations began and it went so far that you were no longer even there, instead it was I who was on fire and it was also I who beat the fire with the coat.       But the beating didn't help and it only confirmed my old fear that such things can't extinguish a fire.  In the meantime, however, the fire brigade arrived and somehow you were saved. But you were different from before, spectral, as though drawn with chalk against the dark, and you fell, lifeless or perhaps having fainted from joy at having been saved, into my arms. But here too the uncertainty of transmutability entered, perhaps it was I who fell into someone's arms.