Small-town girl Making magic, on location BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

Sometimes I forget how small Portland is. Maybe it’s from living in Paris and then Providence and New York City, but I’ve often felt that a city is just a place where people primarily exist in their own little spheres, bumping up against each other, mostly just ships passing in the dark smog of personal lives.

Last week Portland’s size became apparent when a close friend who is on Match began emailing someone who started to remind her of a story I’d told her — and told all of Portland in a column — about a guy who’d driven a stake through my heart last summer.

The similarities too great, she asked and we confirmed that, yes, this was the very same person. Not to be trifled with, and unbeknownst to me, she emailed him a note that basically told him she wasn’t interested in dating someone who had treated a friend of hers like shit. (For the record, the friend who has the balls and the integrity to do such a thing is truly amazing and rare.)

What followed was unusual and, I think, might only happen in a small town. He apologized. To her. For hurting me. Okay this part is a little strange, I admit, but sometimes healing happens indirectly. She then sent me the correspondence and although it opened a whole bag of hurt and anger all over again, I thought that maybe now I might tell him finally from my side what happened for me.

To which he responded. And apologized. And, then closure, finally, is achieved. Nine months later.

But how random is this? What are the odds — even in a small town like Portland — that on Match a friend of mine might meet and greet with my Portland Brutus and then, in the end, we all hug and make up?

Could this have happened anywhere, regardless of town size because of the ever shrinking boundaries the Internet promises?

Last week my theater company opened a show at the St. Lawrence Church where I’m playing a woman named Gabby whose husband is cheating on her. She’s trying hard to make everything okay, until it truly no longer can be okay and it all breaks apart. I started to think about the layers of me and Gabby and then Lanford Wilson (the playwright) that had gone into this thing I’m creating every night in front of people held captive to our caprices and I thought, "God, here I am this single woman whose heart has been broken as many times as she’s broken hearts and I’m playing this woman who is in so many ways like me yet she still believes that the world can offer her more — that life can open up instead of shut her in."

What courage, really. Without close friends, or a network, or any encouraging emails she just knows suddenly what she needs to do, and does it. And she believes she can give herself closure despite a wide sea of pain and loss opening up before her.

The other night the cast — there are four of us — went out for gin and tonics at the Downtown Lounge after opening to a packed house of six people. We could have been anywhere, I suppose, except that we knew the waiter and the people coming through the door.

And, the conversation, I think, could have been that of actors anywhere — rehearsed lines tumbling into real conversation, sex talk, and inane banter about weird noises or smells or brain farts that erupted out of nowhere on stage that night. But what was so lovely was this little family we have created — based on hitting words back and forth like tennis balls and telling each other intimacies through the voices of our characters — sat there together and made our own little world come alive off the stage. We let it bleed into our Portland lives. This — when life and art commingle — is when the magic begins.

When I went home later that night and checked my email a last letter from my past lover was blinking in my in-box. A few last breaths into the darkness of something that had blossomed for a time and then due to a series of confusions and misunderstandings and just bad timing had erupted and scabbed over until now. Somehow in the finalizing of a long overdue goodbye, I, like Gabby, felt myself walk out a door. I got into bed with my New Yorker to read the new Jhumpa Lahiri story, and although I noticed how quiet closure felt, I tried not to feel alone.

So, as I spend the next few weeks in the dark waiting for curtain cues and lights to shine down as I try to connect with my castmates and most inner deepest self, I feel comforted that sometimes life throws you the gift of true friendship and also a little balm to heal your wounds. In the end, no one is as bad as they seem — they’re really just more fragile and hurt and scared than even you are.

Portland just got a little nicer for me. I hope it did for him, too.

Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com . Her book, Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce (Putnam Berkley Group, 2001) is now available in paperback.