This was written as part of an ARG I made for my partner, for our first Valentine’s Day. It took the form of a virtual treasure hunt; this was the prize. It was presented as several separate chapters, each gated by a password field (the passwords are denoted by square brackets).
“Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were [now out of sight of land]?”
It was a cloudy day in May, 2020, on the boundary between autumn and winter. I remember it because I walked, four kilometres from South Brisbane to the north end of Ann Street, to a balconied apartment that would someday be metres from my home.
I remember those wind-worn stone ropes on the plaza, seeming to hold down the riverbank, someday to become my daily haunt. I remember Story Bridge, the steel edifice joining the halves of Brisbane together, someday to be a point of fixation in my thesis project. And I remember you, the person who would someday shift the world around me.
On that day, none of this held any meaning to me. It was a blank page: well-known streets leading to less-known places, slopes converging in a knot of traffic lights—all this I traversed as I made my way to 1204 Metropolis, and our very first D&D session.
That twelfth-floor apartment was lit by the golden sky, reflected off windows across the street. I shook with nerves, lowering myself onto the couch to take it in. Alice vacuumed the carpets and shuffled plants about. Dave sorted through character sheets at the coffee table. Robin woke and zombie walked out of his room.
And then you—the fifth person, the one I knew least—arrived and introduced yourself as Max, the last first meeting before we began to play.
That was the first time I met you. You didn’t look the way I thought you would; maybe my impression was formed from your Roll20 icon, and I thought you would be wearing goggles. You were wearing goggles, just not over your eyes.
That apartment in the Metropolis became the entire world for those four hours. We boarded barques and cursed our luck, we found a beast in the warehouse. There was a magic to that space, like spring before fall, of something life-changing unfolding before me. Even then I felt it, the electric thrill of knowing—within hours—that I was here to stay.
D&D happened once, and then it kept happening, through lockdown after lockdown. I remember the camps we built in imagination, how it excited you when I flirted poorly with an NPC, how you delighted in sowing chaos and how it became our joke that you would someday get us killed.
Then the game moved up the river to Toowong, just two months later, and we took to filling this new niche with tales. I remember how I was almost sick with nerves as the story drew to its first climax, how we called it there for the rest of the year, the guilt thick as molasses in my throat.
Almost subtly as falling asleep, everyone in the room crossed that unmarked boundary from collaborators to friends. I was coming into your network of established friendships, but soon enough I had slipped into the weft. Korean barbecue, sushi, bubble tea, egg waffles, that first evening when you offered to drive me home and I refused.
Eventually I did agree to your drives—after the move when the walk home became a two-hour affair. We fell into a habit, taking the lift down from the fifteenth floor together, sharing late night Domino’s pizza at deserted supermarket tables, walking for haircuts, shooting the breeze on a parapet by the post office.
That was when those thoughts first crept in, like vines uninvited through the cracks—that this was so easy, so natural, and if I could fall for anyone in this group, it would be you.
Those thoughts I pruned as soon as I noticed them.
[We wrote a prelude to our own fairy tale]
and bought a parachute at a church rummage sale
As we sat in the glow of the Brisbane River at the end of that year of years, watching city lights with swaying gazes—you told us you were seeing someone. Like romantically? Someone you’d met at Woodford, you said. Again I became aware of that faintest hope, before I crushed it once more.
New Year’s Eve passed in drunk photos and laughter, us huddled in a pile on the couch—all details I was content to let float under the bridge. We downed fireball shots as the booming of fireworks declared the birth of 2021.
Still, you kept driving me from South Brisbane to Toowong and back again, sometimes later because of traffic or because I had to duck out for lunch. Before I knew it, you were my best friend in Brisbane, the one I always went to because you were the only one who would say yes. And your car had become an island of safety into which I could retreat from the weight of the day, where talking was suddenly effortless.
In May, we met to trade a soldering iron for a clothes iron—a detail we both chuckled over. In the shade of shifting leaves in that house on Turquoise Street, you witnessed me mark my jacket with an orca patch, while I handed you my tools. And I thought how easy, how comfortable it was, driving to Bunnings afterwards to pick up household materials. I wanted to do this again and again, drift through aisles on disparate yet common tasks, like we were…
Don’t do it, I told myself. Don’t do it, you’ll be hurt again.
For the whole car ride back to the Emporium, we made small talk about brushes and dustpans and the roadside sights. I leapt out as fast as I could. But at the five-way crossing, I continued to dwell on you, how you were one of the kindest people I had ever known, and so easy to adore if I let myself.
There would be no D&D that Friday, so I could spend the next week burying the thought of you with the thought of everything else. I didn’t want this, wasn’t over my grief, didn’t want you pulled into my whirlpool of anxieties, didn’t want the heartache, the rejection.
So I said no, and left that hope unanswered, interred in the ground.
You said, remember that life is
Not meant to be wasted
We can always be [chasing the sun].
In the depths of that subtropical winter, June 2021, the five of us planned as we often did to converge at the Emporium for drinks and chat.
Come the day itself, you and I were the only ones who could make it. I hadn’t had dinner so I dropped into McDonald’s first, wearing my longcoat for the first time. You found me scarfing down a chicken burger, coat in a bundle on the table, Looking for Whales propped against the raised table edge.
That was the day we talked about decompression sickness, dual motherboard setups, mental health, meal plans, the things we inherit from parents. Remember that? The glittering balcony of the hotel bar where we pointed out the M1 motorway, shining in the hazy distance? How, half-drunk and fifty dollars down, we wandered to the empty tables on the deserted Griffith University plaza and bared our hearts?
I looked you in the eye then, and a quiet understanding crossed between us, that anything could be said in this space and it would be received with curiosity and care, and kept in confidence, like a treasure.
The thought came again, more stridently. I could fall so hard for you, if I let myself.
I only let you walk me halfway home that night.
It was the small things, paving the bridge from there to here. How you pulled up on Brook Street to help a stranger start their stalled car. How you had taken note of my love for cheese, and gave me a slice you’d handpicked, wrapped in a paper bag—the only birthday gift I received that year. How you bounced along to an unfinished draft of Summer Heat on our drive to D&D, told me it was “very me.” How you met me on a winter evening after pole class, along Queen Street on the path overhanging the busway, to witness my signature on an annexure. How you were there at my sharehouse on a day’s notice, my getaway driver from a room too small for me.
And I knew you were the kindest person I had ever met. And I knew it was so easy to adore you. Pane by pane, you built a greenhouse of light and safety around us, vaulting overhead like the sky, defiant to the cold. Like the sun that pierced through and left its heat inside, your gaze made me feel illuminated and seen.
And when that love lying dormant in the earth began, at last, to sprout, it bolted and climbed and bloomed out wild.
It was an afternoon on the edge of winter, on the cusp of spring. I was settling into that carpeted, glassy Adelaide Street apartment, ironing out the creases. I realised after the repairs that I needed to test the intercom. So I called upon you, because you were the only person it could possibly be—and you came when I did so, on so simple a whim, for so brief a task.
We talked on my couch, strictly friends-only sitting side-by-side—and suddenly we were at Mumo Tea, signing me up for Ingress over ice-cream and bubble tea. A place now shuttered to time, I imagine we will someday recall as we pass the facade of whatever shop takes its place, how it was just inside, at a table no longer existent, that we had that conversation.
Nighttime walks, up and down Kangaroo Point, watching the city ripple in the water. Daydreams and night-dreams of you and I holding hands in a parking lot, stealing kisses in the sodium light. I swaddled myself in my quilt for a day, tossing and turning. I finally let myself want you.
Calculated on risk and reward, what if you’re really aromantic, and what if you’re still seeing that person from Woodford, and is it true we’d be good together? then fuck it, I’ll never live down the regret of not asking.
Here I chance upon the sparkling clasp of a coral reef
tracing the chain [from one atoll to the next].
So I did. I asked because there was no other answer to the conundrum of my waking hours.
And you, although perhaps caught out, as if by a sudden summer downpour, cautiously opened that window to me. I was so thrilled yet so terrified in the throes of change, tiptoeing around the core of my wishes, afraid to overstep the boundaries we’d yet to lay.
All we did on the first date was walk. As we hurried by jetties and deserted alleys, I felt a gap between us and I thought I had messed up, that we needed to talk again about what we wanted and expected.
But the next day, in the theatre, you held out your hand to mine. That simple gesture, I mistook for a plain request at first. Then, it dawned on me that you were just as confused as I—unsure of how to chart this journey, or where we were even going. But even so, you were taking a tentative first step, with me, towards that yet-shapeless future. So I reached out back to you, to take your hand.
Two days later…we did talk. For ten hours. We asked and answered and probed, and by way of analysis we came to a common ground. We discussed demographic graphs and cuddled on my couch. We walked ten kilometres, across Story Bridge, past a book swap, up steep slopes to a clifftop from which all of the incandescent Valley could be seen.
As the days began to gain a tinge of golden warmth, I waited at the Cultural Centre for the 180. Like a bee to nectar I was drawn back to that house on Turquoise Street with the leaves rustling against the windows, a place now left behind. There on your couch, we seemed to melt into each other’s touch, sinking deeper under covers, till you asked for permission to kiss me.
It was not my first time kissing, and yet in that moment, I forgot. It all fell away. Everything seemed new, like I had never kissed before, and I was a fumbling amateur again, breathless, seeing the world through brand new eyes.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot [and never brought to mind]
That day, it hit me that this was—this is—all new. Uncharted territory. Untrod earth.
I never thought I would meet someone who could know me, and whom I could know, as easily as breathing. It dawned on me a thousand times over…as we jogged around my apartment levelling up in Pikmin Bloom, as I sobbed on the couch and you held me and called me amazing, as we were chased across the green by a territorial possum, as we read Tales from the Inner City tucked under your doona, mulling over the pictures.
And it is curious how I met you here, out amid so much forest and desert and sun, a sixth of the world away from home. Yet there are no borders to what you’ve given me, the countless pieces of your world that you’ve shared with me, so selfless and brilliant, a universe unto yourself.
You, a tapestry of qualities woven in such vivid colours as I’ve never seen: how you mix different cereals for breakfast, how you delight in putting wheels on a server case, how you thank me at the end of every hangout, how your preferred intensifying adjective is “spectacular,” your predilection to fruity bubble tea and carbonated water, your excitement for barcodes, the glee with which you plot to order a rainbow cup of popping pearls at Chatime.
I love the way our minds and bodies meet, our explorations of each other, all the new things I’ve learned about you and myself and us, our struggles and victories and defeats. I love the times I’ve cried without reservation beside you, as much as I love when we both laughed ourselves breathless. I love your curiosity, your humility, your generosity, your failings, your quickness to learn, your drive to help, to solve, to brighten everything you touch.
Ask your sister for the next password. [the future left ahead, the past left behind]
I’m a pessimist and a nihilist by nature, and life always seemed to me so empty. But you’re an optimist and full of hope, living for the now, and you have taught me something about it.
It wouldn’t be so bad living for love, would it? All the pain and grief that I have known, and all that is to come…if those past and future partings mean that I get to be here, now, even briefly, sharing this time with you—then they are worth it.
This journey I made to Brisbane was a doomed voyage, a lost war, until the day I found you. The X that marks the spot.
It is exciting and frightening, how living and moving and loving and losing changes these streets. The roads are ledgers and the city is dense with the tales we have written upon it. And we will keep moving, and it will grow more tangled still, an understory of memories. The stone ropes, the pavements are heavier with meaning every time we pass them—the corners where we pause, eat, kiss, sing, cry.
And should you ever leave, all of these things would stay: the weight of your existence, the imprint of your memory upon the roads and bridges we crossed together. Forevermore you’ll be a part of the world as I know it, a part of who I am.
For better or worse, for good or ill, our lives have crossed and intertwined, and all is new and all is fleeting, like the blossoms of spring, like the fruit of summer.
Right now, I could want nothing else.
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