Saturday, January 17, 2009

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.

15 comments:

Commander Zaius said...

I have a short story in final edit in which some of me has bleed over to the main character. Don't know if its worthy of sending into a writing contest much less trying to publish it. In fact it could be down right bad.

Got the six random things meme done.

themom said...

Just from knowing you here...I can understand the impact you have made on this gentleman. I say enjoy the moment and communications.

Ghost Dansing said...

sounds very nice..... mature adults now...

Gail said...

Hi Utah-

what a great telling of "lost and found".....I am such a romantic and this has all the elements of romance in it's 'then and now' sense. Wonderful.

Love Gail
peace.....

Randal Graves said...

Whether utah's tack or BB's, anyone who writes finds themselves in the characters they write; it's inevitable. Now, to be on the other end...

Unknown said...

Oh yes dear woman, you lay it all out there for the world to see.

I am in awe of your talents. I love your honesty most times.

I bow to you Peg, your a shining star in my universe.

Life As I Know It Now said...

so are you going to follow up on it or just keep it online? sounds like a second chance to me...

susan said...

Did you ever read 'Love in the Time of Cholera'? It's an amazing book about love denied but never let go with passages I remember well hundreds of books and many years later.

Utah Savage said...

"Love in the Tiem of Cholera" is a wonderful book and I do remember the longing I had for love. Longing is a feeling that means there might be something.... And yet... I am full of fear... So many what ifs.

Comrade Kevin said...

As much as we cling to this romantic ideal of what might have been---if it turns painful and too contradictory I almost wonder if it was contemplating at all.

For whatever reason or another, back then, whenever it was, it didn't happen and now those times are over.

Utah Savage said...

Comrade, it might be the fifty years of bad choices I made that caused me to shut the door on men as possibility for me. I grew to see man as problem, man as complication, man as energy suck, man as emotionally needy, man as abusive, man as hurtful, mean, every negative stereotype of man has come through my life. Only one year was that not true for me. It was my year in Italy.

But I have never had a mate who gave more than he got. Or even close to as much. So I dream. That's dangerous. Because with dreams come desire and then maybe expectation. And expectation is dangerous, because expectation is filled with the need to control and direct, and the need to cling to, the need to have. Possession may be the soul of love- killing desire. My spirit is not so generous anymore.

And I am no longer lovely. Loveliness was my value, literally. I made my living being lovely. I was an object of desire. I was an object.

Now I'm an old woman. Loveliness has nothing to do with this experience of the old woman I am. I haven't cared about the way I look, unless I'm taking a photo of myself to share with you. And then I clean myself up and put on a little makeup, and even then, I dick around with all the possibilities of cropping and touching up that my Iphoto program allows so that I "appear" lovely in a no nonsense, scholarly old broad who writes. I like the invisibility I have that's allowed me to become the observer and not the observed.

giggles said...

((((Utah))))

lisahgolden said...

Would it hurt to get to know him better? You're both different people now with a lifetime of experience so why not?

Utah Savage said...

actually I spent a fair amount of time talking to him this afternoon. And he sounds like the sweet boy lives on in the man.

He has a house as old as mine that he acquired for a song thirty years ago in a town south of here. It was then country--it's now suburb for the biggerst little Mormon city in Utah, Provo, where Brigham Young University is located. Eeeekkk! (I call Provo Bumfuck. Sshhh!) I know that area is lovely, but I am so insulated here in the bunker. Maybe he'll come visit me. I'd serve him a cocktail or a cup of coffee.

D.K. Raed said...

That is so cool to reconnect with someone sweet from your wild youth. Quit worrying about having grown older, he is older now too, don't forget. And he's only down in Provo? Put Cyrus in the car & drive on down there for an afternoon by lake utah, woman. Just a short stop on the byway of life, but maybe something more, who knows?