Marielle

By Brian Webber

So much of my life has happened on-line it’s easy to forget that I even have a life outside my house. But “real life,” whatever the hell that means has nothing to do with this story. I mean, there are real people involved. Real emotions too, but ultimately, the bulk of this story happens on-line, with whole arguments done via e-mail and Blogs, but this does not make them any less significant, because it was my very real heart that really got broken. It’s too easy to just invalidate it all, say it was all just words on a computer screen, but you can’t say that when you haven’t been through it.

My story is about a girl. But isn’t it always?

It starts just prior to the events of the end of August/start of September 2005. Just before Hurricane Katrina. I was a regular poster on the View Askew Message Board. I was known by the nickname Arkle. There was another user there, a girl from Gretna, Louisiana. Her name was Marielle. We had communicated before. During 2004 we were both hardcore Bush haters. She was a brunette, with a lovely smile, a cute nose that to some people looked big and distracting. She was thin, but not unhealthily so. Despite everything that’s happened, I still think she’s beautiful, albeit only on the outside.

It began when I realized that I was starting to develop a crush on this girl. That in itself was not so odd; she is my age and is very cute, but I’d never really considered her before. It wasn’t the distance. My Mom & Step-father who’ve been together for nearly 10 years now were on opposite sides of the country when they met, on-line. It was Marielle’s age. Generally, I’ve gone for older women. Marielle was my age, so I had doubts, and didn’t say anything. My shutting up made even more sense after Hurricane Katrina. As curious as I was to see if she and I were a possibility, I couldn’t possibly say anything then. My heart and brain agreed (for once) that doing so would make me look like I was trying to take advantage of her. Instead, I joined the chorus of people wishing her well and hoping that she was okay, and being relieved when she came back on for the first time since the flooding. The joy didn’t last long. As often happens on any web forum, a political argument erupted, this one about the federal response (or lack thereof) to the disaster.

During the course of that argument, one user, Susy, made a really low blow comment about one of my previous relationships. I fired back, calling her the C word. I don’t like that word, I don’t like typing it let alone saying it so I think you can imagine just how truly angry I was.

I was banned from that board. I was naturally upset at first about being kicked off since I’d made quite a few friends there. I’d participated in the VA Secret Santa. Marielle herself sent me her extra copy of the then new Nine Inch Nails CD.

By this point, I’d already started my MySpace page. Marielle was one of the first of my old VA friends to add me to her Friends list. We started getting closer at this point, talking more than we had at VA. I’d even trusted her with one my big personal secrets, one that she’s still kept to her credit. I started realizing at this point that perhaps it wasn’t merely a crush, but that maybe I was in fact having feelings for this girl, but again the timing was just all wrong. She had just been dumped, for no good reason according to her. Plus, she was still reeling from the damage done to her city by Katrina, and a lot of her friends who had been forced to leave the city hadn’t gotten back in touch with her. I couldn’t say anything then. What would that make me?

I wanted so bad to tell her, but the timing was always wrong. For example, after all the above had happened, she wrote another Blog talking about how she’d liked this guy who wouldn’t make a move because he felt he wasn’t good enough for her. So what did I do? I told her to stop being so old fashioned and go after this guy if she wanted him.

Then sometime around the end of 2005, I forget the exact date, a guy named Joe who I guess was a friend of hers as well made a racist comment on her Blog about wishing he could “profile” at his gun shop. He said that he would refuse to sell guns to black people and that would reduce the crime rate, and Marielle herself made a really tasteless crack about an incident where a group of New Orleans refugees had been turned away at gun point on a bridge while trying to seek shelter in Gretna, where they had electricity, shelter, hope. But most of the people trying to get there were black, and all the people with guns were white, so between Joe’s statements, and Marielle’s “Don’t cross our bridge or we’ll shoot your ass,” I was offended. My intent was to simply call Marielle on her joke, as I would’ve wanted her to do for me had I said something so tasteless, and really bust Joe on his racist b.s. In retrospect I imagine Marielle would’ve attacked me, then blocked me anyway, but for awhile I believed the mistake I’d made was trying to do both in the same post, so that when I said the only line from that post I can remember, “I feel like I walked into a Klan rally,” she thought it was directed at her. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a little racism after all in her comments about Katrina and New Orleans during those months.

I won’t forget anytime soon what I saw on my profile page in the comment section the next day; her face next to the words “BLOCKED FUCKER!” She replied to my post on her Blog saying that in Gretna they had nothing and that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I wasn’t there. As it turned out through later studies of what happened and didn’t happen to New Orleans, up to and including the recent first anniversary I now know this not to be true, which further fuels my suspicions about Marielle’s latent racism.

At the time however, I was convinced I’d not only lost a good friend, but more selfishly I thought I’d lost a chance at love once again. I’d tell myself things like how pathetic I was. I posted a Blog titled “Open Letter to a (Hopefully Not) Former Friend.” I doubt she ever read that open letter wherein I tried so hard to apologize, to explain what I was trying to say.

I didn’t hear from her for months. I couldn’t stop thinking about her though. I even messaged a mutual friend of ours, asking her to pass on a message about how sorry I was. I never heard back. I asked that same friend later if she thought Marielle and I could’ve been a couple under better circumstances. The friend, Jami, told me something that she wasn’t supposed to. She’d said that Marielle had told her not to tell me this but she said she didn’t hate me, she just didn’t believe we could ever be friends again.

I’m not sure exactly when I’d decided to write the letter to her. I had her address still from when she’d sent me that CD. I’d kept up with her Blog somewhat, though not every day, so I’d had a chance to actually see a video of her and hear her voice for the first time. Hmm… now that I write it, perhaps that was the trigger. Hearing her voice is what inspired me to write that letter. I would like to show you what was in that letter, but after the events about to be described, I deleted the original.

What I can tell about it are that I confessed my feelings for her, my excuses for not having said anything sooner, my sincere apologies for what I’d said on her Blog, along with my two e-mail addresses and my phone number and a request that she contact me even if just say “Stay away from me you creep” or something along those lines. I wish she had done that. It would’ve been less painful than what eventually did happen. I said flat out to tell me if she didn’t have any feelings for me. She never did. A little over a week later, I got a message in my Inbox. It was from her. I remember vividly what she said, “OK. I unblocked you.” That was it. Perhaps I should’ve known then this wasn’t going to go as I’d hoped.

I sent a reply telling her how glad I was. I said that were I there with her in person I’d want to hug her assuming she would let me. She replied with “I would.” I was thrilled, I was so sure I was finally going to have someone other than a blood relative that I could love and be loved by. I was happy, giddy, smiling. I rarely smile. It’s uncomfortable for me to smile; my face just isn’t used to it. It went on. Occasionally messaging each other, me suggesting maybe I could add a few days onto an already planned vacation so I could spend a few days in New Orleans, her saying “We’ll see,” both of us mocking Mariah Carey and Paris Hilton. Things were good, for about 5 days.

One day, I’m looking at her profile page. I just happen to scroll down, and I see that her relationship status has changed from Single to In A Relationship. My mind went to an illogical conclusion; she was talking about me. I was beyond excited! My heart thumped incredibly fast. I messaged her asking if this meant what I thought it did. It didn’t. She was seeing someone else. I was crushed. Up to that point I’d had her in the number 1 slot on my Friends List because I’d believed she was going to be my girlfriend. After learning this I removed her from that spot. Not out of spite, she was still on my list. I just put my Mom back in the top spot. I told Marielle about this, hoping she’d understand. I was clear, or at least I thought I was clear, that this wasn’t spite, it’s just I didn’t want anyone looking at my profile page to get the wrong idea. She responded by saying “That‘s seriously fucked up,” and by dropping me from her Friends List again, only this time she didn’t block me. At this point, I’d started talking with my friend Diomira about her. I told her about what had happened.

“You have never been on her top anything and she has the fucking nerve to pull that shit?” she said. She was right of course, but to be honest it had never bothered me that I was never in Mari’s top list on her profile page. A later Blog of Marielle’s only made me feel worse. She said that people should stop treating the Top 16 as a popularity contest, and that just because someone wasn’t in hers didn’t mean she didn’t like them. The hypocrisy of it all astounds me now, but at the time I really just felt worse about what I’d done. I wrote a Blog about how stupid I thought I was. I said I talked too much and that I was going to die alone. That night after work, Diomira called me at home. She told me what she thought of Marielle, that she was shallow and materialistic, that I was too good for her. I didn’t believe her of course, but that’s unfortunately normal in such situations.

So I sent another message to Marielle. I told her how I felt confused and hurt, how I’d talked about this with a good friend who told me things about her I found hurtful, and I wanted her to assure me that they weren’t true. In the messages themselves I made the mistake of sending along transcripts of mine and Dio’s correspondences with Dio’s name removed to protect her. I don’t remember what exactly I’d hoped to get from that. I know for sure I wanted her to forgive me for the Friends List thing, but as for what else I wonder if I even knew then. Her response was she wanted to know who had said those things about her (among the transcripts were such statements as “She's a self-centered, egotistical bitch.”). I told her, “I needed to talk to someone Marielle. This whole day has been so confusing for me. … I have faith in both of you. I LOVE both of you, even if I'm a little miffed at you right now. :-( I'm sure there've been plenty of times where you were just like ‘Oh god, now what is Arkle up to?’ like back on the VA board when I would get into verbal fist fights with Runs and Mick and them. Even though we've similar political leanings I imagine you couldn't have enjoyed those exchanges. They got pretty nasty, especially on my part, but hey, I'm passionate about what I believe in, what I grew up understanding as right and wrong.”

“FUCK YOU FUCKING PSYCHO!! FUCK OFF!!” was her retort.

It hurt seeing that on my computer screen. I tried to reply to that message to try and get her to understand I wasn’t trying to hurt her. But she’d blocked me again, and she wrote a Blog titled “Open Letter to a Crazy Stalker.” So that was the end. My heart was broken, again. I cried, I hated myself, but I never tried to contact her again.

But one problem persisted. We had quite a few mutual friends on MySpace, including a guy named Ralph. Roughly a week after the “crazy stalker” letter (that I’ve never read), Ralph wrote a Blog about a chart made with tongue planted firmly in cheek showing who frequently visited his page to support his work as an indie film maker. My name was on there in one of the larger chunks. It was funny, and I appreciated the humor of it. But Marielle had read it too, and she went on there and called me Stalker Boy. I was upset, so I told Diomira what had happened, because I was afraid that posting on Ralph’s Blog, even if it was something innocuous would serve to reinforce Mari’s belief that I was stalking her, as opposed to trying my best to avoid her without taking the shameful tack of asking our friends to choose sides. Dio made a post there saying that if she had issues with me she shouldn’t air them out on someone else’s Blog. Marielle said something rather paranoid. “That confirms something I suspected. Besides, everybody knows what he did to me.” At this point, I snapped.

I am an emotional person. I love and hate with equal passion. With the words “…what he did to me,” any positive feelings I’d had for that girl were gone forever.

“What I did to you? Oh that’s rich! I open my heart to you, you stomp on it and I’m the fucking bad guy?”

Ralph deleted that message and hers, and closed that Blog entry to comments, before she could reply, but it didn’t matter. I’d been hurt by someone I’d loved. I was angry. And so began the trend of casually referring to Marielle in future Blog entries of my own as NolaCunt. I typed it with asterisks, because like I said earlier I don’t like that word, but the point is it was war now. Far as I know it’s still going on. She hurts me, slanders me, costs me friends, takes my letter to the New Orleans police (like they don’t have enough problems?), and then tries to claim she’s sent messages where she’s asked me to stop mentioning her in my Blogs, even though I’d blocked her account as well, and would never have gotten them.

Because of her I no longer trust people the way I used to. So even though almost all of these events happened on-line, they had very real consequences. It is one of the most major events of my life, and it will shape how I interact with the opposite sex in the future. The sad fact is, since Marielle, I’ve found myself just assuming that everything a girl says to me is a lie designed to hurt me. Paranoid? Yes, and I feel guilty for feeling this way. But it’s going to take a long time for me to get over what was done to me.

Wish me luck.

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