Chris

You would always ask us “When are y’all coming down here?” A Gulf Coast drawl reaching out to us from the other side of the internet.

The rest of our friends got to meet you, that time you came up to Toronto, but I had left the city just a few months before. We always told the story about how we just missed each other in Pearson Airport by a few hours once, when I was flying to Massachusetts to visit my family. The universe couldn’t allow us to be in the same room, you joked. We would be too powerful.

But, for me, you were mostly a voice and several video game characters, as I was to you. And that was fine.

This is just for you and me, buddy. Nobody else has to understand this. Do you remember the time you screwed up that Lord Kazzak kill? Everybody on Grobbulus Horde was so mad at you. Impotent rage at Bigtony the Orc Warlock rang out through the server Discord and in-game chat channels. You were the most famous any of us has ever been. You owned up to it, told those nerds you were sorry. Maybe you were, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t — you shouldn’t have been. It was fucking hilarious. They were so mad.

Do you remember how you would build Rapiers in Dota all the time for no reason? That one time on Juggernaut when you dropped two for the enemy team and we lost was the signature moment, but there were also multiple times you built it on Witch Doctor. We probably lost some of those games. I don’t even remember. It doesn’t matter. We were so mad at you. It was fucking hilarious.

I understand now that we were getting you through some hard times, at the beginning. Five years ago. God. I’m getting to be an old man now, and I’m starting to understand five years is a very short time, but it’s also a very long time if you’re talking about spending time with somebody almost every day. I look back and I realize how infrequently you talked about friends in real life whom you genuinely liked. Maybe we meant an enormous amount to the Troll Mage that we found in Trade chat that momentous day — I didn’t remember, but you always reminded me, that I personally was the one who found you and invited you to our guild. This might be the greatest thing I have ever done.

I’m told by someone who was told by a friend of yours that you spoke very highly of us, the idiots you played video games with. It was more than we deserved, but I’m honoured that you thought enough of us to even consider saying anything of the sort.

We had adventures in our little virtual worlds. There were boring days that seemed to stretch on forever, and there were exhausting days, and there were days of triumph. And they were all happy. Even the ones that weren’t happy. They were all happy. I understand that now.

Maybe half a year ago, some amount of this goddamn pandemic back, we decided to make our own guild again, the newest incarnation of our always struggling, always ill-fated raid team. Nobody was more excited than you. Things are always best when it’s like that, you told us, just us friends running our own team and raiding together.

I look back now and I think you may have needed us very much.

We all thought your life was going so well. You were getting through school, working hard tending bar, taking pride in your work and saving up a lot of money. It meant that you had almost no time to spend with us, but we thought that was a good thing, a man moving onto better things. Friends don’t begrudge friends for that.

We knew many of the stories of your hardships. They do not need to be written here. We were proud of you for overcoming them.

It’s very easy, academically, to understand that you shouldn’t blame yourself. It’s very easy to say that phrase to somebody. I hardly talked to you the past half a year. I wish I did.

I wish I spent more time with you. Not because I feel guilty or because I think I could have changed anything. I wish I spent more time with you because it turns out that I had so little time to make one more minute of memories with you.

You made a lot of fart jokes. Sometimes you would log onto Discord, yell “They’re here!”, slam your desk, and disconnect for several minutes. You would challenge us to duels declaring that it was Mak’Gora and we couldn’t refuse and then when you lost you would walk your character into a fire so he would die. You made a lot of poop jokes.

For almost the entire five years we idly planned the trip down south. Always a dream with all the unfailing beauty of potential. We kept pushing it back. We were men in our 20’s. Always on the move. Always struggling to find two weeks to spare. Always content to wait until the next summer.

It would have been so easy to find two weeks. And now there are no more summers.

You were going to take us fishing. You loved fishing.

We loved you so much, Chris. I loved you so much.

We’ll always remember you.