The Moving Staircase

I caught her eye as I was doing a shoulder shuffle to Dance Dance, by Fall Out Boy. I smiled, possibly too much considering I’d had about six drinks already. She looked gorgeous in her bridesmaid's dress. But this is not the start of a love story. We were in Baltimore, MD, and I was the only international guest at the wedding. I couldn’t help but wonder how many miles, hours and days me and and my friend had spent travelling and planning to see each other. When the first moment came that we realised we had the potential to meet face to face, I felt more disbelief than excitement. I was finally going to meet the person behind thousands of words, hundreds of emails, and hours of sitting at my computer, typing down my trivial life events.

In the lobby of a hostel in New York City, she was waiting for me. Even though we’d seen a lot of pictures of each other, had Skyped and heard each others voices, the bubble of a five year online friendship was about to be burst, and I was about to meet a stranger.

I approached her and we both smiled. She stood up and then stooped down to hug me, being about a foot taller. For the first time since I started interacting with her, I was at a loss for words. She’d meant so much to me, and suddenly our dynamic was about to change, forever. Suddenly she was undeniably real.

Her friend she’d travelled with came out of the bathroom and was excited to meet me too. But a piece of toilet paper stuck to her shoe ruined the moment, and gave us all an in-person ice-breaking laugh we needed.

“What do you think the secret about Aunt Petunia will be?”

“I have no idea.”

This is 99% likely to not be what our first conversation was, but it was more than likely to be about Harry Potter.

After becoming hooked on virtual gaming site Neopets, I began using it as more than a way to waste the weekends. Guilds were a thing, smaller communities/clubs based on a theme, which sometimes rewarded its members for dedication with expensive or sought after site items.

I joined a Harry Potter guild on 26th December 2005 (like the antisocial twelve-year-old scrooge I was). With just over 30 members, it felt like the kind of place that promoted getting to know each other, not just building an empire for your own benefit, like some others I had previously been part of.

The owner seemed cool, starting discussions about different Harry Potter based theories, Neopets goals and how the site was a nice distraction from every day life.

I learned that a lot of the members actually knew her in real life. The second-in-command of the guild was her cousin, her own mother had an account and was in the guild, and it was a similar story with her sister and school friends. But they never made me feel like an outsider.

After a couple of months we began messaging outside of this community, into each others Neopets inboxes, appropriately called Neomail. I didn’t even know her real name, but we began sending long messages, about Neopets, Harry Potter, and real life situations. Regularly our messages would exceed the 1000 character limit, so we’d send several one after the other.

Then, a time came that we didn’t talk for days at a time. School work got on top of both of us, Neopets was sold to a corporation which introduced real-money spending initiatives, and suddenly it wasn’t the place that we came to have fun. We were growing up, and growing out of giving a shit about virtual pets that couldn’t die no matter how long we didn’t feed them.

So I sent a tentative message.
“Hey, I’d hate to lose touch just because we don’t use this site much anymore. You want to swap email addresses?”

Her response? “Absolutely!”

Things continued this way for a while. We’d never seen pictures of each other, but we trusted in each other some of our most personal life details. She knew minute-by-minute moments of my first serious crush, in which I managed to write months of emails based on a few singular moments of interaction with a boy in the year above, including a diagram I drew on Paint to illustrate a time he seemingly watched me walk down a corridor. In return, I got regular updates about a high-school crush of several months, which turned into a real-life boyfriend for her, and he was included in some of the first ever pictures I saw of her.

We made graphs and charts to better understand the different education systems we lived in. We tried to describe every day things like healthcare and slang sayings, and there were cultural learning moments, like me reassuring her that digestive biscuits are just a snack, not a cookie to help your digestive system. And then Facebook turned into a worldwide phenomenon. And we both had accounts, which made our involvement in each others lives that much easier. Our friendship suddenly began feeling a lot more tangible, dimensions being added to it.

We were reluctant to tell our parents about each other. But Beth broke the ice on her 18th birthday, to which her mums response was “Oh, I know you talk to her.” She was deflated, thinking that she’d kept her internet adventures a secret and part of a rebellious teenage life, but it also made the acceptance easier, and we met a few months later.

I started bringing her up more casually. At first she was “this girl I talk to in America” and then she was “my online friend in America” and then, as a way to sweet talk my mum into the idea of letting me visit her by myself, she became “my online friend in America who I met in New York on that college trip.”

We Skyped some more, our mums talked and met each other virtually, and we sent each other big care packages as a Christmas in July/my 18th birthday initiative. She was becoming a larger part of my every day life, and still we sent each other huge updates on our love lives, our school and family lives, and other little things we wanted to mention.

Reading through the old emails now, it seems as if we used each other as diaries we knew would give us feedback on our lives. Naturally, the first few meetings were jarring. I couldn’t turn to her and tell her all the things that had just happened, because she’d been there too.

Meeting and hanging out with her friends offered a good buffer, and they provided faces to names that I’d already read hundreds of times.

Then there were the landmark victories. The wishes we initially expressed and then put effort the in and granted ourselves. 4th July and Thanksgiving were two holidays she repeatedly told me she wished I could experience, which in due time I did. I’ve spent a birthday in Baltimore, learned to pick crabs and make pumpkin pie and also feel helpless being so far away as riots broke out across the city in summer 2015. I know so much about that place that I don’t understand what’s relevant to strangers.

In 2012 when I had a journalism class, my teacher asked me the first thing people think of when they hear Baltimore, to help me write a travel article.

"Hairspray, I guess"

"Um, not really what I was thinking of."

"Ohhh, Edgar Allen Poe."

"Not quite..."

"The Battle of Independence?"

"The Wire, Sophie, The Wire."

“Oh."

Beth and I found this hilarious, saying she’d over-cultured me.

Finally she made it to England in 2013 with a friend. And it snowed the day after their arrival. England shut down, and doing all the things I’d planned became a mission. Roads were impassable and trains had delays, but I crammed our week full of visits and sight seeing and genuinely exhausting them beyond belief. Of course, we visited the Harry Potter studios and took pictures of every single thing imaginable, feeling the roots of our friendship all around us. We talked about my plans to study abroad in Chicago the following school year, and how many times we realistically could meet up during then. I hadn’t quite grasped that the American school system was a lot more classroom based at degree level than the English one, nor that being ‘only three states away’ still meant a lot of expenses and travel time. But we managed twice.

And then I graduated, and life seemed to speed up. We could go weeks without talking, and suddenly all the drama I’d once rush to tell her seemed insignificant. I knew I was growing up, and she was too – she was finally at nursing school, following her lifelong dream and goals.

But still, I believed in our friendship. I remembered the fear in the back of my head when I first met her, that by taking that step, we'd somehow broken the magic and would lose touch forever, that we wouldn't like who the other person really was. And I remembered the letter she hid in a photo frame on my 19th birthday, with the line "I don't know what my life would be like without you on the other end of those emails." And I really didn't, either.

So when in September 2015 my plane landed in Baltimore and Beth and her boyfriend were waiting for me at the airport, a rush of relief and excitement swept over me as we squealed and ran into a hug.

Even though she had a busy week of classes and tests, she made sure she could spend every possible moment with me. Her family treated me like one of their own, picking up any slack caused by her necessary absence (most particularly on the day of the wedding I’d flown in for).

And on one of my last days before I went back home, we were discussing our friendship. We laughed about our naivety at some things, how we’d over-analyse our friends behaviour which now seemed simple and obvious. And I was amazed she still remembered Mo Pain, the rapper who convinced me to buy his CD on the streets of NYC in 2012, and how the CD wasn’t blank, much to Beth’s surprise.

Having caught each other up on any gossip from people we used to fill our emails about, we marvelled at how it’s been almost a decade since we first spoke to each other.

“Even though we’re not directly involved in each others every day lives, you’re still a really important person to me. I’m so glad we’ve kept in touch despite the distance.” I told her.

“I think it brings a whole other level to our friendship; it’s worth traveling across the ocean for.” she said. And it was that moment that I knew for sure neither of us would ever give up on the other.

Which brings me back to when I caught her eye at the wedding, and we both smiled, it wasn’t the song I was thinking of, or how gorgeous the wedding was. It was of The Moving Staircase guild, almost 10 years ago, and how it brought me there, 3500 miles away. Of how we’ve climbed the staircase of our friendship, and it had moved around a few times, and now finally we’ve reached the top, hand in hand and ready to remain side by side through the rest of our lives.

Or maybe I was just a bit drunk.