ON FORGIVENESS: FOR HB WHERE EVER YOU ARE

One must admit that it is easy to take advantage of people on the Internet; especially through programs like Icq or in this case AOL. I have a few apologize to make and the first one is to a man that I know only has Tom, Hooked Bass (HB) was his screen name, and that he lived in Longview, Texas. He and I started talking because one of my other on line friends felt that I needed someone to talk to doing the day and he worked nights.

I didn’t know it was a set up till much later. I really thought that we had started talking without anyone’s help and that we had just clicked into place. He was and is still, I hope, a very nice person. He would talk to me for a good portion of the afternoon before he went to work and we got where we would talk on the phone. Soon the person, who had told him about me, became a memory and we did develop a relationship of our own. Sometimes when he would come in late late at night, we would talk for a while by phone or by AOL.

It was doing this time period that I met the man that I married. His name was also Tom. Tom had to move out of his house so that he could get the divorce processing going and I wasn’t in a position to met him yet, so he moved in with another AOL person, named Barbara. Barbara started out being real nice to me, but as Tom lived there he knew he couldn’t stay there, that he belonged with us. So one night he told her that he was leaving on the first of August to come to us. Barbara went into a tizzy and hit the roof. She started calling me on the phone and cussing me out. Even going so far as calling my boss at work and trying to get me in trouble there. I have always felt sorry for Barbara and we tried to make her see that this was what was right for Tom but she yelled and screamed and living with her was a strain for my Tom.

So one night I told HB that I would come to him when I could afford it. This way he told Barbara that I was going to him to be with him and that she didn’t have to worry about Tom and where he was going. Tom, meanwhile, was getting everything done up there so he could leave on August 1st to come to where I was going to be in Denver. Barbara got a little better towards him and me even though she would still call me a murdering lying whore on AOL every time she signed off. HB meanwhile was hoping that I would soon be with him. I would have had to drive to be with him and I didn’t have any money and neither did he. So we carried on this romance thing over the phone and on the Internet.

Meanwhile time was passing and it came time for me to leave to go to Colorado and to meet Tom. I told HB that I was just going to Colorado for a couple of weeks and that I would meet him later probably on the way home. I felt bad deceiving him, he really was a nice man and didn’t ask for anything from me. He was a good person and was looking so forward to my being with him.

When I got to Colorado I was staying with some friends and I knew that Tom would be there soon. I called HB to tell him that I was staying in Colorado. He was upset at first, but then he did some figuring and the work he could do he could do in Colorado also, so he called me and told me he was coming to Colorado to be with me.

I told him not now, maybe later when I got settled in my own place.

Tom came and we were an instant success. We loved each other and got our own place and were so happy. My younger daughter came to stay with us for a while and things were going great, then HB got my phone number. He called me late one night and he heard Tom ask who it was. He started crying because he was so hurt and he told me, “well why didn’t you just tell me?” I felt terrible I had wanted to tell him but I didn’t want him to be hurt. I was hoping I could just disappear from his life.

It was a foolish thing to do and I hurt this man very much. Christine rationalized in her mind that it was I Serena that had hurt him, but it wasn’t. It was all of us. We wish we could go back and undo the past but we can’t. All we can do now is pray that HB found a nice lovely lady and has made a good life for him and her.

If someday he reads this and I doubt that he will, I have no way to get in contact with him and it has been four years now. If though through some fateful act he reads this then we want to tell him how sorry we are that he got used like he did. We want him to know that he was always a friend when we needed him and we enjoyed the time that we spent talking to him. We miss him and would have liked to just be friends with him but he was too hurt and angry. I pray he got beyond that now and can think of us with a little compassion and not hate us so.

God be with you, Hooked Bass.

You will never know how sorry we are that you got hurt

Serena & Family