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my go-to discord server became a memorial space recently.

one of my best friends, harley, passed away in late december. we'd known for about a year that they had cancer. we didn't anticipate how little time they had; a month ago, they let us know that the cancer had metastasized to their lungs. they didn't talk about their prognosis, but they mentioned they'd significantly weakened. i was terrified and i tried to hang on. i tried to trust they'd let us know if they had more information. and it's not like i thought they had decades left - but i never, ever would've guessed i would hear their voice for the last time only a couple weeks after the revelation.

all of us in this discord server are close friends. i (and the others) would count them among my best friends, actually. nearly every internet weirdo who's had an irrecoverable impact on my psyche, for better or worse, i met under insane circumstances, and this group is no exception: we met 13 and a half years ago because

1. youtube had just been bought by google, and was integrating with google's to-be-failed social media project, google+. this meant that youtube now displayed screen names as Firstname Lastname, rather than a single username with no spaces.

2. this was very exciting for certain subsets of people who recreationally pretended to be fictional characters online with other people

3. i had also just started getting into persona, was looking up the OSTs on youtube, and saw someone with the name "Kanji Tatsumi" (a persona 4 character) talking about in-game events in the comment section. heeding a call to destiny, i rushed to make an account for "Naoto Shirogane" (another P4 character), my absolute favourite persona companion. i started roleplaying with the "kanji" in the youtube comments.

4. over a couple of days, other people seemed to have the same idea as more cast members from P3 and P4 revealed themselves. youtube channels of the time had subpages where any user could comment directly on the profile itself - so our kanji created a new channel specifically for hosting comments between all of us, consolidating the roleplay to a single place.

5. we DID keep up with the roleplay for a while (i wanna say a year?), but people talked more and more out of character and we got more interested in opening up about our personal lives. we also started using google+ to DM each other and do video/voice calls in hangouts, which was pretty much just like what zoom is now. the craziest part about this is we earnestly used G+ like a social media site, and i'm always the only person among anyone else i've ever met to have done this.

what ensued was sometimes horrible, but mostly beautiful - a couple years of cartoonish antics as certain toxic people or other misfits bounced off of our group, one way or another (breakups, bullies, reactionaries, people who just kinda drifted); as the more emotionally mature and dedicated people remained, we settled into an enduring, chill friend group who hung out at least a couple times a week. eventually one of us heard about a new thing called discord, made a server for us, and for the next several years, it would be the only thing i opened discord for.

9 years later, this server is now a place of mourning.

what's striking me about this social circle now is, among all of my teenage-era spaces, this survives alone. i have individual friends i feel a commitment to, but none else that are tied to a collective energy like this. there've been rough patches and distance, sure; but drifting from them earlier on whenever i held a grudge felt like resisting some sort of fate. there was never a doubt in my mind that i was going to be friends with these people forever. it's probably incredibly predictable we feel this way about each other after playing The Video Games About Loving Your Friends. there's just nothing else like it. it's so silly how much we were a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that way. it's cheesy, it's tropey, it's TV-world: we're best friends in a way that goes beyond what you can see physically.

we don't live close to each other and don't talk to each other's families. in a random call started by a friend (john) recently, he brought up that we hadn't seen harley online in over a week. i swallowed my nausea, choosing to believe with him that harley was probably just taking care of themself, maybe in the hospital for intensive treatment (it had happened before). with my friends in my ear (the magic of bluetooth), i left to finish up something in my kitchen. after a few minutes, i heard john sigh in a way i'd never heard before. i assured myself it was nothing. he then said, "i mean... they're gone." they'd found an obituary posted just earlier that day that matched their full name, their birth date, where they'd lived and were born; it was undeniable.

nothing prepares you for the finding out. i could barely make it back to my PC. my paw was shaking too much to hit the "mute" button as i hyperventilated.

it was horrible. it was a moment that in my worst-case scenarios, i thought would happen in, maybe, months.

in all my worrying since learning of harley's condition worsening, i never imagined that something approaching beautiful could follow.

we stayed up for hours. we talked about how easily it could've been days or weeks until we found out, but we just so happened to get together that night, and john so happened to raise the concern. he even was going to be busy with something social all day - the other party cancelled at the last minute. i'd also had a long excursion planned with my partner that we ultimately decided against. i'd felt weirdly Off, as did john who'd been aimless all day (he was "flopping around", as he says); it was then he started the call to try to motivate him to do something. it was only on crisscrossed layers of unlikely contingencies that we discovered the obituary mere hours after it was first posted.

we noted a number of other funny things, too. john had just thought to resubscribe to final fantasy XIV the other day, one of harley's favourite games and something he hadn't done in months. harley's ultimate cause of death was pneumonia - literally right before the call started, i was finishing up watching defunctland's series on jim henson with my girlfriend, who also died of pneumonia. harley also worked at a regional grocery chain that i'd only heard of a couple days prior when another friend in the group explained it to me, coincidentally on the date of their death. someone else pointed out that one piece, which this friend had been introducing harley to over the last couple years, released a manga chapter earlier in 2025 titled "harley" (or "the harley").

john said he really did feel like harley had pulled some cosmic strings somehow, to get us thinking about them and to know their fate before too much time had passed.

my own relationship with thinking like this is fraught, to say the least. i do feel an innate draw towards a mysticism of sorts. i've also had my fair share of struggles against new age thought pushed on me in my youth, and ensuing OCD and psychosis. i can't say for sure how comfortable i feel claiming to understand or feel what is or isn't "there", beyond what you can see.

what i did say - and this is the truth of my feeling - is that to me, the universe is like poetry. most forms of poetry, read like prose, obviously don't make semantic sense; the point is to be invited to draw connections, to imagine beyond the bounds of what is known to be strictly correct or visible. i simply observe events in my life, i draw similarities and coincidences and metaphors, and i invite them to remind me of the bigger picture behind it all. i can't say for certainty that there is, or isn't, someone or something writing that poem - do i write the poem, or does the universe write poetry with my life? the night that i realized i needed to divorce my ex, i just happened to be agonizing outside, and i saw a meteor split in two in the sky above. it stunned me into bitter laughter. what are the odds? did the unknown seriously summon a flaming rock a gajillion miles away, angling it just right so it would cleave apart in earth's atmosphere and i would be there to witness it? i don't think i'm that special; i just can't not slot it into the larger poem of my story. it's too funny not to.

i don't want to assert that it was divine intervention that i came to persona in the first place, but that's also a bit of a wild story. i was introduced to it through a friend i often skyped with at the time who was checking out persona 4, playing it out loud on his TV which i was able to listen to through his mic; i first experienced persona like a radio drama. hungry to finally see the game myself, i asked that he wait to start persona 3 until i could get a copy in the mail. we played P3FES together over skype, keeping our progress synchronized.

if it wasn't for that, if it wasn't for plucky internet mergers and lonely video game roleplayers and just happening to see each other's comments, none of that would have happened. if it wasn't for random cancellations and spikes of ADHD brain fog, none of this would've happened as promptly as it did, either. we discovered harley's death the way we discovered each other living - on a series of interconnected happenstances, so delicate in appearance that it's hard to believe it wasn't placed there by a knowing, skilled hand.

we had an online celebration of life for them on the day of their actual funeral irl. it was wonderful and a little harrowing. i cried harder than i had in years before it started; i cried again late that night as we shared memories and intimate knowings about harley. a friend of mine said this: "they were so reserved, it's hard to understand them fully - but if you take the pieces we each had of them and put them together, you get a full picture."

this is what i want you to know about harley: they were reserved, but they were an incredibly dedicated friend. they were contrarian, opinionated, and sarcastic, and they were steadfast, and reliable, and often soft-spoken. they played so many fucking video games. they loved persona, kingdom hearts, resident evil, metal gear solid, dark souls, silent hill, final fantasy XIV, ace attorney, death stranding... many more i could name. they loved showing these games to people - they would stream an entire playthrough just for you if it meant you got to appreciate it the same way they did. they laughed easily and endearingly. this is just a small look at the poem we have created with the disparate little pieces they trusted to the each of us. together, as a group, we create an even larger body, one that started to be written those fateful days 13 years ago, inspired by a game series that urges us to treasure exactly those kinds of relationships.

i'm angry, and depressed, and despondent. i didn't expect that grief would also make me feel incredibly happy; touched beyond words that this friend spent so much of their life with me, and was a part of making this group what it is today. i needed other people to hear just a bit of how silly our origins are, how much they mean to me... and about harley. they started this poem, and we will continue writing it in their memory.

(thanks for reading and staying in touch - you can leave a comment directly on the post itself if you like. t’oyaxsut ‘nüün ❤️)