Life & Wisdom Quote by Adrienne Rich

Obsession here isn’t romanticized; it’s bureaucratically thwarted. “I keep coming back to you in my head” opens on a private loop the speaker can’t stop running, a compulsion that feels both tender and humiliating because it produces no evidence. Then Rich snaps the line into the world of paper and proof: “but you couldn’t know that.” The ache isn’t just longing; it’s the asymmetry of knowledge. One person lives with the other as an ongoing interior event, while the other remains unnotified, untouched, unburdened.

“I have no carbons” is the killer detail. Carbon paper is a retro technology of duplication, a way to leave a trace, to make an extra copy that confirms you were there, that something was sent, that a record exists. By invoking it, Rich drags desire into the material conditions of communication: what you can’t duplicate, you can’t really deliver; what you can’t document, you can’t defend. The line carries the period’s texture (letters, offices, institutional life) while also reading like a metaphor for the problem of being legible at all.

In Rich’s broader context - a poet of power, gender, and the politics of address - the missing “carbons” suggests more than forgetfulness. It’s about the structural scarcity of outlets for certain attachments and certain truths. The mind can keep perfect copies; the world demands paperwork. The result is a love (or grievance) that exists intensely, and yet cannot be “cc’d” into reality.