Forever Best Friends

It starts, the way most of the good things in my life seem to, somewhere entirely unremarkable. An office. A Tuesday, probably. 2017.

There was a technology in the building that year that precisely one person understood, because he had been carrying it on his own for the better part of a year. My first boss at that company put the two of us on it together — me to learn it, him to teach it — and we are still supporting that same thing today, years and several job titles later. That is the whole mechanism by which we met: somebody else deciding where to put us.

It took about a week. There was no building to it, no slow warming up — we simply discovered, somewhere between a failed deployment and a very long Thursday, that neither of us could stop talking. Games. Computers. The particular joy of a thing finally working at half past six on a Friday when the floor has emptied out and there is nobody left to show it to.

I want to be precise about what this was, because I do not think men are handed much vocabulary for it. It was not a work friendship. It was the real thing — the kind where you know what is actually going on in someone's life, where they are simply part of the furniture of your week, and where either of you would have dropped anything on any given day without needing to be asked. He was my best mate. Blokes do not tend to say that sentence out loud. It is still the only accurate one.

And we have never met. Not once, in all the years since — different countries, a couple of hours of clock between us, and the better part of a continent running north to south in the way. I have never shaken the man's hand. It has never made the slightest difference to any of it.

He became my mentor, although neither of us ever said that word aloud, because saying it would have made it a thing. He was simply better at it than me and generous about it, which is rarer than people think.

─── ✦ ───Overwatch, and Then Everything Else

The first game we played together was Overwatch. I am still playing Overwatch. That is not a line about loyalty, it is just a fact — I have never stopped, and some part of every session is still 2017.

Then he found out I liked MMOs, and that was the end of my peace.

─── ✦ ───Running Lalas and People With Bunny Ears

Final Fantasy XIV, he said. You would love it. So I looked it up — properly looked — and what I saw was a great many very small people running very fast, and a number of grown adults who had chosen, of their own free will, to have rabbit ears.

Ugh. No. I think I will pass, thanks.

He did not pass. He has never once passed. He brought it up the next week, and the week after that, and somewhere in there I bought the game purely to end the conversation. If you have read the About page and wondered who the coworker was — that is him. That is the whole of it. He would not let it go.

─── ✦ ───Twenty Hours

I lasted about twenty hours, and I want to be honest about how foolish the reason sounds to me now. I could not get past being locked behind the main story. I could see the good things from where I was standing — mounts, glamour, whole expansions of it glittering just out of reach — and between me and every bit of it stood a very long queue of people who wanted to talk to me. I did not want to be talked to. I wanted the shiny things, immediately, the way you do.

So I stopped playing. For a year, nothing.

─── ✦ ───How Did I Miss That

Then I started running into the sentence. You know the one. Everybody knows the one — the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn for free, with no restrictions on playtime… — and I would like it on record that at the time I found it thoroughly insufferable.

It kept happening anyway. Thread after thread, comment after comment, free trial after free trial, delivered flat and without hedging by people who had no earthly reason to lie to me.

And I thought: how did I miss that? What exactly did I look at? So I went back, properly this time, and I have never opened Elder Scrolls Online again. Not once. It is presumably still installed somewhere, like a coat left in a cupboard at a house you moved out of.

─── ✦ ───Every Single Day

I joined his Free Company, and then for years we played every single day. Roulettes before dinner. Weekends that disappeared into the same fight. Somebody always sitting in Discord even when nobody was really playing anything.

And — I will admit this once and then we shall never speak of it again — sometimes during work. Not badly. We were both good at our jobs and we took them seriously, and if anything so much as twitched we were back inside a minute. But there were afternoons when a dungeon happened, and I regret none of them, and I would like that noted.

You will not have to work terribly hard to spot me in the picture below. At that point I was still loudly, publicly and on the record appalled by the entire concept of being a Lalafell, so I had given myself as much height as the character creator would allow — and both of the small ones standing there are them. I have since become precisely the thing I was panicking about. There is a whole other post on that, and I would genuinely rather you read it than watch me attempt to explain myself twice.

I miss it. That is the whole sentence. I miss it.

─── ✦ ───The Conversation We Should Never Have Had

People say that all things come to an end as though endings are orderly. Ours was not orderly. Ours came out of one conversation we had no business having.

A political thing. Personal rather than abstract — the sort that sits underneath what someone believes about the world rather than on top of it. What it was does not matter, and it has never mattered less than it does now, so that is all I am going to say about it.

By then we were very nearly business partners. There was going to be a startup: the two of us, the late calls, the plan, the slightly stupid working name we both secretly liked. It was going to be ours.

His views and mine turned out to be a very long way apart. And that night, after thinking about it properly — he said clearly, and I believe him — he told me he could not build something with somebody whose views were that different from his own.

He also said he did not want it to ruin the friendship. I think he meant that completely. It simply turned out to be one of those things that is entirely sincere and entirely impossible at the same time.

❝He did not want it to ruin the friendship. I think he meant it. It was both sincere and impossible.

─── ✦ ───The Silence

What happened next was nothing, which is worse than something. There was a project we were both on, and I finished it more or less alone.

In the Free Company the invites stopped. Not dramatically — nobody announced anything, nobody had to. There was just no tell on a Tuesday, and then no tell the Tuesday after that. Work stayed work. Perfectly civil. Perfectly fine. Completely unrecognisable.

Days. Then weeks. Then months of opening a Free Company list where nobody was going to ask me along.

Eventually I left it. That is the part I still turn over — not the argument, not the call. Clicking leave Free Company on my own, with nobody to tell.

─── ✦ ───Where We Are Now

We still work together. Years of it. We tell each other dumb jokes, the safe kind, the kind with no person inside them. We do not talk about anything real, and we have never once played a game together again.

And it is fine. Genuinely. You could sit near the two of us all day and not notice a thing.

I am still in the main quest. Turns out that was never the bad part.

─── ✦ ───If You Ever Find This

I doubt you will. But the internet is a strange place and these Chronicles are public, so on the off chance:

Nothing has changed for me. Not one thing. Friends are forever — I know exactly how that sounds and I am saying it anyway — and if you ever need anything at all, you can count on me, and you would not have to explain yourself first.

I am rooting for you. Constantly, quietly, from a slightly awkward distance, but constantly. I hope life is being good to you. I hope it is being good to your family. And I hope that startup happened somewhere, in some shape, even without me in it.

You dragged me into this world. I have a house here now, and a Free Company, and friends on three separate worlds, and a blog that absolutely nobody asked for. Every bit of it exists because you would not let it go.

Thank you for that. I mean it more than all the rest of it.