For mezzo-soprano and piano
Duration: ca. 6'
Commissioned by the Cincinnati Song Initiative and the National Association for Teachers of Singing (NATS) with special support from Lori Laitman. 

Excerpt of letter by Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Thursday, January 21, 1926.
Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of The Beneficiaries of the Estate of Vita Sackville-West. Copyright © Vita Sackville-West

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: 

I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality. I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. 

You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.”