"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.