On November 5, 1917, 100 years ago today, Wilfred Owen wrote a gorgeous love letter to fellow gay World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon. It continues to be one of my favorite love letters of all time.
“I once asked my friends if they’d ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don’t know anything about them, but you feel the other person’s there, one friend told me. It’s like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow.”
My mattress is strapped to eight roombas and I leave all my doors open at night so the roombas can go where they want to. I wake up where they want me to be. I trust their decisions.