A letter from the Jazz Age

From Zelda Fitzgerald to Scott Fitzgerald, c.1936, from a mental hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.

"Dearest, dearest Do-Do:

     What a funny picture of you in the paper. I wish we had just been swimming together, the way it seems - I'll be so glad when you come home again. when will we be three of us again - Do you remember our meal in the biltmore when you said "And now there'll never be two of us again - from now on we'll be three - " And it was sort of sad somehow and then it was the saddest thing in the world, but we were safer and closer than ever - Oh, I'll be so glad to see you on the tenth.
     Scottie [their only child, Frances] was as sweet as I had imagined. She's one inch shorter than I am and weighs four pounds more - and I am her most devoted secret admirer -
     Maybe I can home home -
     O my love
     O my darling        Yes, I mean it
     That's what we said on the softness of that expansive Alabama night a long long time ago when you envited me to dine and I had never dined before but had always just 'had supper.' The General was away. The night was soft and gray and the trees were feathery in the lamp light and the dim recesses of the pine forest were fragrant with the past, and you said you would come back from no matter where you are. So I said and I will be here waiting. I didn't quite believe it, but now I do.
     And so, years later I painted you a picture of some faithful poppies and the picture said 'No matter what happens I have always loved you so. This is the way we feel about us; other emotions may be super-imposed, even accident may contribute another quality to our emotions, but this is our love and nothing can change it. For that is true.' And I love you still.
     It was me who said:
     I feel as if something had happened and I dont know what it is
     You said:
     - Well and you smiled (And it was a compliment to me FOR you had never heard 'well' used so before) if you don't know I can't possibly know
     Then I said 'I guess nobody knows -
     And
          you hoped and I guessed
          Everything's going to be all right -
     So we got married -
     And maybe everything is going to be all right, after all.
     There are so many houses I'd like to live in with you. Oh Wont you be mine - again and again - and yet again -
     Dearest love, I love you
                                                                   Zelda
Happily, happily foreverafterwards - the best we could

***
From Women's Letters, eds. Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler.