Thursday, December 31, 2009
dear Naomi, I lost your address!
Dear Naomi,
I’ve lost your mailing address! I have your long letter—incredibly, deliciously long—but it doesn’t have your address in Peru on it. Your envelop got tossed accidentally, which I didn’t realize until days later. I’m desperately sorry. That was no unconscious desire to avoid responding. I’ve been doing too much, being too dissociative during a clean-up day. I expect your exasperated follow-up note about why I didn’t reply to a girl I helplessly adored 34 years ago. Meanwhile,…
Your expressed love for the sense of me you represent is beyond heartwarming. Thank you for sharing your story of the decades after I left you to your own way through teen years. Know I love to read about your life.
I’m as sorry as you are that difference in age drew us separate ways. You now wanting me in your life—knowing about Janna’s death—is about someone who has also lived through those decades unpredictably—bizarre events, too, which have affected me permanently—and much had happened before you captured me, which I didn’t take chances to share. So, I know that your story now is implicitly an invitation for me to respond in kind.
I want to. I’m still the insatiable “young” writer who never cared about publishing, just loving to write. I want you to understand how I’m open to finding you again to be the last face I see.
Maybe detailing a lot isn’t necessary, but I feel I should—well, this is a chance to, at last—do some autobiographical stuff I resisted in earlier years. You can be the reason I give time now to remembering well. I’ve recently feared I’ll die before being fair to what may be worth recounting, worth engraving into the Internet Archive, if nowhere else.
I’m a little embarrassed by a pretense of that, as if your interest is an excuse for writing about a life you haven’t overtly asked to know.
Yes, I’m still 25, in a sense. And you’re still 15, nearly 34 years later? Funny! You want to know whether we’re still enough like back then for each other now—“soul mates,” we avowed, as if I was an Absolute Beginner again—now that each has lost their partner?
“Their partner”—as if I’m a character with you in an uncaptured history that someone other than us would care to trace.
One reason I resisted autobiography was that I was so oriented to new experiences, new learning, always trekking on, as if looking back was infidelity to a glorious horizon.
And who would care to read the story? Everybody’s got a story. “How did Naomi and Gary fail to stay in touch, since they believed that they were the truest love they’d ever live? Inquiring minds want to know: Will they be another example of well-versed, if not trite, final happiness decades after parting? Will their story be drawn into a touching sunset?”
Stories are usually for some market, which I could never care to entertain. My life, any life, is really nobody else’s concern.
People—readers, viewers—are voyeurs of others’ lives, almost pruriently seeking a godly magic of narrated access into privacies, like a camera’s eye that presciently shifts scenes—out of intimate conversations (and beds) or sudden surprises, etc., etc.—in confidence about what the implicit story is to be, which its characters can’t anticipate, while the consuming viewer / reader enters into a self-chosen time-space catered by an author—or/and production team—who wants a profit from a manageably contained world having hidden destiny that will end resolutely and coherently, contrary to most real lives.
Why not just live on without sacrificing time to look back? Love life’s horizonal emergences as much as possible—make moving on a cohering gravity, like a calling that never finishes its lovely poem.
Then die in the unsaid flow of things, like most all life does?
Ultimately anyway, we’re like flowers.
Let biographers rummage through one’s textual remains to do what it takes to get enough royalties to sustain one fashionably between excavations—or academic tenure.
I don’t know how much I should say for you. I’d resist phoning, video, Skype, whatever, even if I found your contact info on the Web—which I sought but didn’t find. I’d resist media other than here because I’m addicted to this “interface”: inwordness maybe surviving us, born of potential that audio or video will never capture.
And, well, seeing you again—I’m not ready.
I’ll get back to you when you write again.
Truly yours (maybe)—love, clearly,
Gary
