For Cal

Something unusual has happened. I'm getting sweet emails from a man I only knew briefly as a boy. I was the aggressor in my brief pursuit of this boy. He was sweet and obliging. Tender and willing. But I was too young and too damaged to know what a treasure he might have been had I the wisdom of age. And then the experience that might have matched my very youthful rebellious ardor. But he has found me. And I am, in this strange almost imagined relationship, like a character from a TS Elliott poem, ...when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon the table...

I have laid bare my life with all it's challenges and deficits for anyone to see. I have not been shy or hiding here. I do tell all. And then there is a novel. There are short stories, and poems. They say much about who I am. Are these stories real or fiction? Some combination of the two I suspect. Like most writers, I write about the things I know and tell my version of the truth.

However, it may not be true to you if you find yourself the character in someone else's fiction. So caution is in order. Because I don't know enough about you.