We met early in 03, as the crow flies, it doesn’t seem that long ago, but the calendar doesn’t lie and 15 years is a long time by any metric.
We weren’t friends at first, just casual acquaintances who shared space on a message board now defunct (and while good times were had there, I am not sorry it’s gone because the owner was three kinds a predator and no one cottoned on until much later on. We were kids still and broken ones at that with nothing to go on but a small feeling that X was weird). I had no idea that you’d become such a central focal piece of my world – at the beginning you were a screenname and a signature that always made me laugh (something that would come up years later when I finally read the book the quote was from – evil bathrobes were always a joyful thing for us, my dear).
You had magical words and fascinating theories and even if I didn’t agree with them all of the time, they were always well thought out and articulated. You had original fiction that I couldn’t get enough of. My only disappointment was that none of them were ever finished. I never did get to find out what happened to some of them.
It did not take long, even in internet years, before we’d gone from casual acquaintances to friends to best friends. We went from talking here and there on message board threads to having each other’s personal emails, instant messenger usernames (AIM, Yahoo!, and the old MSN Messsenger), and skype numbers, talking in some way, every single day.
We fell into a pattern. And one day, discussing fandom characters wasn’t enough so we started our own version of an online RPG. We played in other people’s sandboxes for a while before starting to build our own.
And oh darling, that was where you shone. All the theory discussions and what if’s and might have been’s came home to roost in the wondrous maelstrom that was the worlds we built together, taking pieces from things we’d written before, little bits of worldbuilding that hadn’t belonged anywhere else.
We took pebbles and made them into galaxies.
It saved me more often than once, during the hard days when there was more than just a time zone between us. When there were oceans and an equator that separated us. The worlds and the words and the ideas pulled me back from the black time and time again.
It is a debt that I could never repay and I loved you for that. For the ability you had to never judge me, even when the words came out wrong, even as I stumbled and stuggled through issues. You were always there with a listening ear and a shoulder and advice. You were a pillar when I desperately needed one when the foundation under me started crumbling.
You were my safe space and my anchor and my co-creator of so many words and worlds and characters. You took the stars in my eyes and breathed life into them.
We hit the first million words of shared worlds and decided that we still had so much more to explore so we kept going.
Through your graduation and college and then my move back and college. The first time we met was when you came to visit family and met me in DC.
You were everything I’d thought of and more and it just deepened the love and affection I had for you. I didn’t know that’s what it was then, I was still digging all the parts of myself out from under masks and out of the tiny corners they were shoved. Making a cohesive person out of so many fragments is hard and slow work, but you never minded it.
You were one of the few that didn’t push or require anything but myself. No masks required. I tried to be the same for you, it was only fair after all.
DC was only the beginning. Then came your college graduation and the Portland trip and you gave me Powells and the coast and Moe’s and a thousand wonderful moments. You gave me Dragon Con and panels and learning our way around the larger parts of the genre we both loved so much.
We traded books and movies and music, boxes shipped coast to coast. Things we found, things we read that we loved and had to share. Things we didn’t love but needed to yell about. Everything was possible fodder for inspiration for the worlds we’d built, the stories we wanted to tell, the situations we wanted to write out.
We started to measure our characters by how detailed their family trees had gotten.
It was the thing that made everything else worth it. I had this to look forward to and that thought alone got me through so many different situations and trials.
You were the sun I orbited around and it was love, even if it wasn’t the kind of love I thought you wanted. I was so confused and terrified and we were still friends even after that one disasterous conversation.
You never had a problem with me being myself and shining as bright as I could. Or even giving me a boost to shine farther if I needed one. You were seven times a miracle and I always felt bad that I didn’t feel I could give you everything you deserved. Everytime you reminded me that relationships aren’t transactions and this is what whole people who weren’t complete dicks were supposed to do for each other.
I never had to hide around you and I never felt ashamed of myself around you until closer to the end. The perfect storm of miscommunications and personality clashes and the hard intersections of disabilities clashing with each other broke a lot of things. We worked hard to repair it but you could see the cracks and the patches. If I had a time machine, I’d have gone back and done what I could to make a lot of that period better. It wouldn’t have fixed everything but it might take out a lot of the poison from some of the thoughtless barbs and insinuations.
I never wanted to hurt you, on purpose or inadvertently. I was a mess and you helped make it better, helped me learn to want to be better, that it was okay to ask for help.
We got through that period though and though it was more awkward sometimes, we still were there, we still had our worlds. All the wonderful millions of words littered across the internet at large.
At least we did until that day I woke up and you were gone. I couldn’t find you anywhere and then I looked for you in our words and found so many of the shared documents gone as well.
That’s when I knew you weren’t coming back. That’s when I knew the extent of the loss.
I wish I had been better all around. For both of us. I wish I could found some way to keep you here with us. The space you’ve left in my life and my heart is overwhelming sometimes. I keep turning to tell you something and you’re not there and the loss crashes into me again. I know eventually this open would will at least scab over, but for now, it’s so fresh and raw. It’s hard to go from talking to you every single day to a couple of times a week to this.
It’s been two months since that day and I can only just now put my feelings into words. Even still it’s taken me three days to write this much and there’s so much more I haven’t even touched on, the inner light of your smile and the amazing way you never needed words when a look would do and how I always knew I was safe with you.
I miss you. I hope wherever you are, you’re happy and loved.
