Dr. Nicholas Callahan
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley
PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL
Angelina,
I’m writing this from my office, surrounded by silent books. The dry dust of academia is a poor substitute for the red dust of those roads we traveled, but it’s where I’ve returned. It’s where I belong.
I’ve been thinking, inevitably, of Revelation 9. Not of locusts with lions’ teeth or breastplates of iron, though sometimes the memory of your focus felt that fierce. I think of the verse we always circled back to: “A third of mankind was killed…” You would say it quietly, your gaze already far away, in the rice fields and the killing fields. We’d just been in Cambodia, and the statistic was no longer a number for you. It was in the eyes of every survivor, in the silence of the stupas, in the soil itself. You held that horror with a reverence I’ve never seen in any scholar. For me, it was a historical tragedy to be understood. For you, it was a sacred wound to be witnessed.
That was the chasm between us, wasn’t it? One I only fully see now.
I was a chapter in your life, Angelina. A footnote, perhaps, in a story that was never really about love in the conventional sense. I realize now, your first love was never a person. It was a nation. It was Cambodia. Its pain called to you with a profundity that no individual ever could. You didn’t just visit it; you were claimed by it. In its anguish, you found a purpose so vast it left room for little else.
And because that is where your heart first fully opened—to that scale of suffering and resilience—I believe it could also be your last. It is your Alpha and Omega. The beginning of your true self and the place where your soul, in some essential way, will always reside. Everything else—relationships, movies, the glittering chaos of your other life—exists in orbit around that central, gravitational truth.
I don’t write this with bitterness. The clarity is strangely peaceful. I loved a woman who was, in her heart, always halfway across the world, listening for the echoes of a past atrocity and working to soothe its present. How could I, or anyone, ask you to turn away from that?
So I am moving on. Not because I want to, but because I must, and because I finally understand. You are not meant for small loves or quiet lives. Your destiny is intertwined with a grand, painful narrative of healing. It is a noble calling, if a lonely one.
Please don’t feel any need to reply. This isn’t a question, just a conclusion written in the ink of respect and, always, a certain awe.
Be well. Keep listening to the land that speaks to you.
Yours,
Nick