From Nikola Chubrich
Date: Decmber 2, 2020
Subject: December 2, 2020

Dear Dr. Meyer:

I hope you have been well the past few days. I have few words at the moment, probably because I have made little time. I have filled my schedule with various consultations, from people I have come across in the process of trying to learn how to handle the manic-depressive life pattern. They have all been helpful, sometimes surprisingly so; but there have been more such conversations in a given time than, in retrospect, I would have undertaken. Especially problematic is that they have taken me away from my mother during the day.

I am sleeping well, and finding, before bed, an ordinary melancholy. My love for my parents is tinged with the knowledge that one day, unless I am fated to die first, I will lose them. I do not expect that there is anything that can mitigate this knowledge, nor make it bearable.

I find therefore, our correspondence tinged with the same melancholy. My affection for you (which you referred to in the spring, and so I feel justified in mentioning it) and gratitude for the availability of a listener who will tolerate my intellectual eccentricities, thus enabling the expression of what you called "the thought which inebriates me", is tinged with the knowledge of future loss.

Therefore, may I say to you, Dr. Meyer, as you so often say to me: be well? 

The next time I see you (I am headed down tomorrow), I wish to show you something of what I have come to understand about back pain, and the motion of imperfect bodies. 

Of course, the possibility of an in-person meeting carries more potently the very same melancholy I have referred to above. I feel well, but in this day and age, is it enough to say so?

Nikola.