Sun, 19 Nov 2006

yellowtail
Last week I got an email from a woman who went to school at UNI who told me she read the stories I had posted online, and at the scrytch archive, and she wanted to meet me because she had something she wanted to tell me, and wanted to tell me in person. I was skeptical — this has happened to me half a dozen times, and never with good results, but I’m at an odd place in my life and decided that if nothing else this meeting would be an exception to my ordinary days, so we met for coffee in downtown Cedar Falls, where she told me she had recently become engaged, and was soon to marry, and she wanted to know if I would attend her wedding as it was due to something I had written that her relationship had been possible. She explained that she came to school here from a small town in western Iowa, to which I must explain that the difference between western and eastern Iowa, which is probably beneath the notice of most people, is vast to locals, and with not only the geographical distance but the cultural difference — Cedar Falls was such a big city to her, coming from her town of four hundred people, smaller than my high school graduating class — she felt isolated from her peers, and closed herself off from the standard ways college freshmen get to know one another. She continued living like this, in her little apartment on 19th street, for the first two years, spending time studying, or looking at websites. I went through a phase of self-promotion when I returned from Austin, and put up sad little page-sized posters with short stories and the url for my site, then on neuron, around town, and she was struck by something in one of these little stories, and began reading my website. One of the Ana Skyfish stories reminded her of herself, and led to a reevaluation of her solitude, and how she could never be loved if she was not open to love, or words along these lines, as I was growing increasingly uncomfortable and not following her exactly, until in the middle of her shyly smiling discussion of her fiance’ Bradley I stopped her in mid-gush and told her I could not under any circumstances be held responsible for anything she chose to do or not do with her life and that anything she may have read into anything I had written was entirely of her own choosing and she looked at me, confused, and tried to explain no, it’s a good thing, I’m trying to say thank you, and I stared at her, livid, and said so if I wrote some story about some girl who killed herself then I guess that means you would have done that too and she said no, no, you didn’t make me do anything, that’s not what I mean, and I stood up and screamed at her you can’t tell me this, this isn’t fair, I’m not just some witness to the joys and tragedies of the world, and stormed off, and attempted to drive home but found that my hands were shaking so badly that I needed to sit for a few minutes and breathe before I could even start the ignition.
(03:25.11.19.2006) [/scrytch] #