Chapter 177 : Alyssym. Nearly two years later, a girl whom I would later date for a brief time --Alyssym-- asked me to tell her a story. When I first got to Duke, I'd begun writing a (still) ongoing series of vignettes about my life. Though they were extremely autobiographical, I've always throught of them as fiction because (1) they were only from my own perspective and therefore inherently not the whole truth and (2) I invariably changed small things here and there in order to make a better and more unified story out of the events of my life. So this girl asked me to tell her a story, and I immediately decided to tell her the story of the Virgin Mary, which, for some reason, I had not yet thought to write up in LG. The story came easily and seemed to flow well. As I neared the part of the story dealing with the logs of my conversations with Clio, I balked at explaining the fact that I had once felt extremely drawn to a young woman online and spent many nights talking with her for hours at a time. Embarrassed, and still uncertain about how I felt about Clio, I covered by instead inserting into her place the character of "Succubus", an agressive online seductress who wanted to devour me bodily. Succubus was, in no way, Clio; rather, she was the embodiment of all of my fears of my feeling for Clio and about online dating in general. >>  continue  >>