When It Seems Too Good To Be True, . . .

It could have been so wonderful. In a flash, I saw just how perfect it might be. After all, this “Sharon M. Torres” so obviously, so exquisitely, so sensitively got me, got Strands!  And “she” wants to promote my book?! (Even now, even after discovering that “her” adoring email’s first sentence is a scam classic,* I struggle to use those quotes; I still cannot fully accept that “she” isn’t real. Somehow I feel uneasy; as if I’m betraying a kindred spirit?) What a joy it would be to work alongside such an insightful and thoughtful woman—who writes so well!

It’s odd:  At eighty-one, mostly I feel as though I’ve weathered a spectrum of feelings over the years; life’s thrown me enough curve balls that, mostly, I’m “Oh, that again?” But as if I were some benign, Other-Me poised a few feet above my desktop as I read “Sharon’s” email, I watched myself, as my sister would say, be torn.  At my age, I have had plenty of disappointments, of course. I am no stranger to cynicism; to mentally sneering “Yeah, right!” So, immediately, I told myself: “This is obviously too good to be true.” But how thirsty I was, apparently, how much more desperate than I’d actually understood or acknowledged I’d been to be so thoroughly seen, understood, lauded! I watched myself sneer as I read—yet drink in and linger over every AI-generated syllable.

Sigh.

* In case this happens to you, here it is: I hope this message finds you well, and perhaps even finds you smiling, because I have just finished Strands: An Apprenticeship with Grief and Loss, and I have to tell you: it stayed with me long after I put it down.