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Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 1847
Catherine Earnshaw grew up on the Yorkshire moors beside Heathcliff. He was brought to her father's house as a child, an orphan with no surname, no money, no standing. They ran wild together for years.
Edgar Linton is everything Heathcliff is not. Gentle, moneyed, heir to a fine estate across the valley.
Catherine has accepted Edgar's proposal. She knows it is the sensible decision.
On the night she announces the engagement, she sits in the kitchen with the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, and tries to explain why she is marrying Edgar. She does not succeed. What comes out instead is the thing she was not planning to say.
“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
Look where she put that word. Necessary.
Not beautiful. Not thrilling.
Not the love she would choose if she were choosing. The one she cannot put down.
She is sitting in a kitchen telling the housekeeper she is going to marry another man. And in the middle of that sensible explanation, the real thing falls out of her mouth and she cannot get it back in.
I need you to hear what she is not saying. She is not saying Heathcliff is better than Edgar.
She is saying there is a difference between a love that will change with the seasons and one that is underneath everything, holding it up, whether she wants it there or not.
We have a word for the first kind. We have greeting cards for it and timelines and a whole industry ready to tell you when it should begin and when it should be finished.
The second kind we do not talk about. Because it does not behave.
Because it does not leave when it is supposed to. Because you cannot put it on a schedule and it will not be practical and no one looking at your life from the outside can see it working.
She says: I am Heathcliff.
Not I love him. Not I want him.
I AM him.
She found the one sentence in English that makes love and identity the same word. She said it out loud in a kitchen to a woman who did not understand, and she did not care, because it was the truth and she was finished pretending otherwise.
You have something like that. You may not have said it out loud.
You may have been told it was too much, or too late, or not something a woman your age still carries. You carry it anyway.
It did not ask your permission.
It is not foliage. It is rock.
Underneath it I wrote
I stopped calling it too much. It is the exact right amount.
Today. Copy the sentence that begins "My love for Heathcliff resembles" by hand. Slowly. Feel the weight of that word, necessary, when your own hand puts it on the page. Then write one line underneath. Not what you wish for. What you know.
What I wrote that year
Underneath a line of Chekhov, in the February of the year I could not write, I copied one sentence three times because I had nothing to put below it. On the fourth try I wrote: "Still here. Still reading." I did not know that counted. It counted.
