Another close friend had died some time back, and she reflected on the connection between that and a period of heavy activity on the bulletin board circuit. “When I logged on, I could just be some faceless person—no one had to know that my best friend was in the hospital room semicomatose because he had developed full-blown AIDS. There were so many people in my life that just up and left because Ralph* got sick; it was almost as if I had AIDS just by association. So I got online and became everyone’s favorite sweetheart.” Then a signal fact emerged in the correspondence, something that explained who Sue was, and why Sue felt like Sue, although I believed that she and Greg would have wanted to be together even if her circumstances had been different. “I had just found out,” she told him, “that I had won a fight against a terminal illness while Ralph was losing his. I don’t talk about the fact that I am a cancer survivor very much, because I haven’t been in remission that long. It will be two years in September. “All I want to do is make it to the five-year mark and forget the pain and the tears and the chemo and the treatments,” the letter said. “I want to look forward and be able to see a future without constant trips to the hospital, to days and nights when I can just be healthy and happy. I have a tendency to block out when I was sick because if I don’t think about it, I don’t remember it, and if I don’t remember it, I don’t worry about it coming back. If you ask, I will tell you everything.” Very early on in their friendship, Greg had known that the cancer was cervical; any children would have to be adopted. Sue ended the message by assuring him that she no longer wanted “the foreign policy degree from Georgetown anymore, or the chance to have the President asking my opinion on things.” Her goal now was Greg, an affordable flat, and a roomful of kids to teach. The rest of her letters went on to discuss such cosmic questions as Sue’s love of long showers in the mornings, her tendency to roll around a little in her sleep, and Greg’s hatred of his cataloguing duties.[7.7] “I love love love love love you,” he wrote, and heated up the wires some more while he and Sue dreamed of hugs at the airport, unstoppable passion, and a wedding. “Know,” he told her, “that there’s a goofy, tall, dark, Australian, madly-in-love man here dreaming of you, and us, and the future.” I was betting right now that they’d make it to that South Dakota church. Lee Chen: The Lover as a Peripheral