Foreword to the Following

The story told below is, self-evidently, expressing the writer’s viewpoint. A modest effort at balance has been made, but the reader may more readily understand LL’s actions and feelings to the degree they may be clearly implied, than the writer, who to those more understanding will be seen the more clearly as a clown or a fool.

The likelihood is acknowledged, even embraced, in the cause of accuracy; as well, the knowledge on the writer’s part that such a likelihood exists as almost certainly something more than a likelihood.

I have not stressed sufficiently a central element in both the experience and my narrative: LL had and presumably still does, an intense sense of privacy. This lay behind her determined pervasive silence about large and important areas of her life that I found so endlessly frustrating, and encouraged a variety of suspicions that served to block my impulse to and desperate desire for intimacy.

This is not hard to deconstruct; we didn’t trust each other, clinging to our distrust as protection against emotional damage.

All this is, I suppose, simply to say that my effort to engage the reader’s sympathies should be watched carefully, and that LL has not taken part in the telling, nor, I’m sure, would she.

Finally, it is to say she is surely not nor will not be happy with my telling this story, because it has worked against her privacy. Because I strongly regard her notion of privacy as flawed, and because it was my best, perhaps my only way to put the pieces together in a way that made sense, I disregarded her privacy and wrote this account.

There is another episode to come, in which LL will play a significant role at the beginning, in a way I imagine she would be willing to find not invasive, and she will remain a presence, because she was more or less a presence, in her absence mostly, in my mind and heart throughout. But I expect she will move into the background and shadows.