Grief is a hell of a drug.
There was a time when I was younger that I didn’t think internet friends were as important as real life ones. Then I met Oliver. Oliver was a fan of mine from the old Newgrounds and AlbinoBlackSheep days. We met on steam and got along well. Very well, in fact. We had similar senses of humor, and many of my favorite jokes and memes and gags came from him. He lived in the UK and I lived in the US and we talked via Steam for years and later, when it was available, Discord.
Oliver was like a brother to me. We talked about frustrations and pain in our lives we didn’t share with anybody else. We’d theorycraft about updates to DOTA2 and other games we liked to play. Discuss stupid crap in pop culture and shoot the shit for hours. Oliver always believed in me and, like many of my other online friends, never quite understood why I’ve become such an unlucky massive disappointment as an adult, potential all squandered. He always told me he wished our lives were better. So we could both be happy.
He’d send me music sometimes for bands I’d never heard of, introducing me to things I’d never experienced. Through him I started to realize that he was just as important to me as any real life friends I’d had. Even more so in many cases as many of them got older and found success and moved on with careers of their own, while I continued to struggle here and make something of myself.
He was there to console me when I had my nervous breakdown in 2009 that lead me into a deep depression. He was there to cheer me up when I turned 30 years old and was depressed again. He never got a chance to turn 30.
A bit over a year ago he was feeling poorly and saw a doctor and learned he had lymphoma. The prognosis was good and he felt confident he’d beat it. He’s show me photos of the giant ghastly lumps on his skin where his lymph nodes used to be. And I hoped and prayed to whatever I could that it would all go well and he’d recover and have a normal life. But I wouldn’t be writing all this if that were the case.
A couple weeks ago he had lost the ability to walk properly due to developing anasarca as well. It made him unable to visit family in Germany which broke him as he wanted to see them one last time. His last couple of big outings was meeting his boyfriend in the US and later attending a Newgrounds meetup where he got to hang out with Luis, another Newgrounds animator he was friends with. He was in bad shape at that point, a bag of fluid around his heart mutating into a giant growth that protruded from his chest. But even that he took lightly and would crack jokes about. He was just that kinda guy.
Over the years I had drawn stuff for him, usually involving his beloved orange tabby cat, whom he had raised from a kitten. The week he had learned he had lymphoma, that cat was hit by a car and killed. He grieved for it a lot. He loved that cat and would send me pics of it all the time. I even painted that cat as a kaiju once, lording over a city. That illustration is lost to time. I wish I’d kept it.
The one bright spot was months later he found an abandoned black kitten and adopted it. It was one of the few positive things in his life anymore.
As his condition grew worse, I asked him a handful of times if he wanted me to draw or paint him anything to cheer him up. As an artist it was all I could really do for the guy. I’d have donated my own lymph nodes or heart to him if I could have, but such things arent possible. About a week ago he finally had a request. He wanted me to paint something from the game Jet Set Radio and Jet Set Radio Future, which were two of his favorites as a kid. He was eager to try out Bomb Rush Cyberfunk since it looked like a spiritual revival of that series.
So I painted like a madman. Painted as hard as I could, sleeping little, hoping to make something he would love. His birthday would have been last Thursday, just a couple days ago. At around 1 am, the night prior, I sent him the painting. He was offline, which struck me as odd. He was one of those guys who was always connected to the web, usually playing Runescape. It was ominous.
Then 24 hours passed, with him neither online on Discord or Steam. I had a bad feeling that he was already gone. And learned hours later, from his other friend Luis, this was indeed the case.
My beloved friend Ollie died the night I finished his birthday gift. He never got a chance to see it. He never got to celebrate one last birthday. I wish I’d sent the unfinished version when I had the chance. I wish I could have made him happy, even for a little bit, in the multitude of ways he often brightened my days.
But it won’t happen now. It’s a very strangling feeling. Like someone has wrapped razor wire around my throat and is winding it tighter and tighter. All we needed was one more day. Not a lot to ask for, in the grand scheme of things.
There’s not much more else to say so I’ll end this with a link to a video he and I used to reference all the time. A cartoon we often chuckled at, and one of his favorites. We Get The Night.
Rest in Peace, Ollie. You absolute lad. You beautiful bastard. I hope if there’s a heaven that you save me a seat, man.
