queerbychoice | Excerpt from _The Golden Notebook

"An image kept coming into my mind: it was like a shot from a film, then it was as if I was seeing a sequence from a film. A man and a woman, on a roof-top above a busy city, but the noise and the movement of the city are far beneath them. They wander aimlessly on the roof-top, sometimes embracing, but almost experimentally, as if they are thinking: How does this taste - then they separate again and aimlessly move about the roof. Then the man goes to the woman and says: I love you. And she says, in terror: What do you mean? He says: I love you. So she embraces him, and he moves away, with nervous haste, and she says: Why did you say you loved me? And he says: I wanted to hear how it would sound. And she says: But I love you, I love you, I love you - and he goes off to the very edge of the roof and stands there, ready to jump - he will jump if she says even once again: I love you."

Look, it's the story of my relationship with Jeremy!

And he must have jumped, since he's never been seen since.

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And, incresingly it seems, the story of Jeremy's relationship with everyone else.

I miss that guy.

Yes - it is, in fact, the story of his relationship with everyone. He completely abandoned every single person he ever knew online without a word, even people he'd known for years and solemnly sworn to always be there for, and I know how badly he's hurt them because the majority of them are my own dearest friends.

All in all, I have no real choice anymore but to conclude that his former adorableness was somehow not at all real, no matter that every single person who ever loved him including me finds that impossible to really comprehend because he was just so . . . adorable. Yet I have seen him do incredibly horrid uncaring things to people over the past nine months, not just once or twice or three times but over and over nonstop, and not just to me or a few others but to everybody he ever claimed to love, and my brain doesn't want to process it at all but I can't really entirely not process it either. And I don't talk about all the horrid things he's done to most people, I only talk about it with a small circle of my (and formerly his) best friends. I don't explain it to any of the other people who also knew and loved Jeremy from a slightly greater distance, because it just feels too awful to "betray" The Adorable Jeremy by openly acknowledging to a large number of people who wouldn't otherwise already know all the details just how badly he betrayed me and many other people. But then I see him listed on people's friends lists and I know they don't know half the story and I think wait, maybe I have a duty to warn them of what sort of monster this is whose return they're bothering to keep persistently hoping for and caring about. Especially since half of them only added him in the first place because of how highly I spoke of him back when he was my girlfriend.

It's all so confusing, how to handle it. I'd give full gory details to anyone who asked me for them via email or AIM; I'd just feel guilty about posting them in public. But probably none of it makes any real difference anyway, since he'll probably never be seen online again for the rest of his life, or rather he'll probably come back onto some area of the internet someday but he'll use a different handle and not associate with a single one of the people who used to know him on LiveJournal because even though I haven't spread the story of what he did around widely, and neither has any of his other abandoned friends, he finds himself unable to believe that we haven't).

It's nearly impossible for me, being a hardcore internet addict, to even comprehend how any human being possibly could cease using the internet entirely, so I was highly skeptical when he first claimed to have stopped, but I believe it now. I do actually believe he's not even online under any alternate username for now. He's probably afraid that if he did log on he'd eventually succumb to the temptation to type in the LiveJournal URL, and he's absolutely paralyzingly terrified of stumbling back into my journal and having to be reminded of how badly he abandoned everybody. He's completely convinced that I've written detailed rants about his evilness daily for the past nine months, and since he's too terrified to look and find out he can never be sufficiently convinced it's not true.

The bottom line is: some people hate you because of what you've done to them, but other people hate you because of what they've done to you, because they can't be around you at all without remembering it, and there's not a damn thing you can do to make them stop associating you with that. You can try all you want to assure them you've forgiven them and they shouldn't feel guilty, but this just makes them feel all the guiltier because you're being nice to them when they know they don't deserve it.

Wow, Doris Lessing must've been fucking clairvoyant. It's a shame that we can't control the behavior of our past and present loved ones, isn't it?

*pats Gayle*

hi, thanks for adding me to your friends list. I always love finding new people online that rock.
and so close to boot!
cheers
Laura

The bottom line is: some people hate you because of what you've done to them, but other people hate you because of what they've done to you, because they can't be around you at all without remembering it, and there's not a damn thing you can do to make them stop associating you with that.

this is me to a "t". i have taken to running the other way when i see my former independent study supervisor.
me. the girl who normally loves confrontation--prefers it to many other kinds of communication.
but i can't talk to this woman. and it's not because she's a bitch. it's because i know i let her down and went back on a promise i'd made, even though at the time there was way too much going on in my life to deal with some idiotic women's studies project.

i'll probably carry that guilt much longer than i should. and right now she's one of the only reasons i can't wait to leave this school.

Hey, just noticed you added me. Have to say I love your username! My ethos exactly, even if lots of GLBT folk scowl at me for saying so-- and by extension, I can only support what you're doing :D. Cheers!

Heh. Very interesting, i hadn't really thought of sexuality ever being a choice. Most likely because there had never been anyone there to say that it could possibly be. Everyone was shoving down my throat the thought that sexuality is just who you are and you can't change it and all that blah blah. I guess, in a certain sense, i may choose to be bisexual. While most people figured out their sexuality or at least that they were "different" in Middle School, while i didn't even know what BI was back then. it was only when i had found the GSA at my school that i began to even question that i was actually not straight. But did that mean that i had those feelings all along? i never had crushes on girls in MS and only developed crushes on girls after i had kind of realized that bisexuality was an option.

Wow, I've rambled with no paragraph breaks. that's not typical for me!

So i shall end on the note that your icon is most beautitious. if that's a word, it is now at least

--Mariel

Hey - saw that you added me as a friend. May I ask how you found me? I'm always interested as to how people find my LJ and end up adding me as a friend.

I found you because a few days ago I decided to steal half of

upsidedownblue's queer friends. Because

upsidedownblue has a really good friends list, and expressed a generous willingness to have its members stolen, and even conveniently presented me with a helpful list of who on it was queer. I examined all their journals and stole five of them. Careful research and evaluation determined that yours was steal-worthy, and had been left undefended by any burglar alarms, thus making an ideal target.

Hee hee. Thanks.

Excerpt from _The Golden Notebook_ by Doris Lessing

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