Echoes of a magic night

Content warning: grief. Also note: if you've been around the fediverse since before 2021, you may have a personal connection to this grief.

Of all the half-written or half-formed pieces I've had floating around in recent memory, parts of this particular one have dwelt in that limbo state the longest, I think. I was never quite sure what to say. I just… felt.

But on a recent morning's commute, I was listening to the end of Collapse Under the Empire's The Fallen Ones, having picked it out of my library on a previous commute a few days prior.

That day, it had me on the verge of tears. I think, in that moment, that particular music had unlocked something.

Collapse was a group I started listening to in an era when I was discovering a lot of new music. And a lot of that was driven by my friendship with someone who was a very close to me—someone most of us only knew as Val.

Back in some of the smaller and cozier days of the social network everyone now knows simply as "Mastodon" (we would much rather you called it "the fediverse"), Val was best-known on a now-shuttered instance known as Cybrespace. There, she'd post memes, cyberpunk art, start threads to ask people about their successes on "Winsday". And she'd also post links to some pretty cool music.

One of the very first things Val and I connected on was sound. Hearing aids, actually. I had an open thread around my very first explorations on the subject, long before I'd actually dive in, that she engaged in. I was just beginning my journey, and I really appreciated our conversations on the topic.

And we also connected on music—things that moved us, recommendations, getting a feeling for what each other liked and whether something we loved might be something we could share. My discovery and appreciation of Collapse was part of one of many conversations along those lines, when I'd pull up a bunch of new stuff, then pick and choose things I thought she'd like and stick them into a playlist, and she'd give them a listen—and she'd do the same for me.

Even when it came time for Val to DJ up some music on her public timeline, we connected, in another way. I developed a program that became at least a little well-known in fediverse circles called "fediplay". fediplay would watch your feed for things that looked like music links and play them in the background. I would talk excitedly about it with Val while I worked on it.

I shared it with the wider fediverse, of course, and used it as an excuse to nerd out on a bunch of stuff. But its raison d'être was a desire to just tune in to whatever Val was playing, because what she was playing was so good. I even included screenshots of her posts when I showed it off at a technical talk about the architecture of the program. I wanted other people to experience the music she shared too.

There was one other musical memory I'll always hold very, very close to my heart, though, something I've never shared before. There was one night we decided to listened to Violet Cold's Magic Night together.

Once synchronized, we were messaging each other first about the music itself. As the tracks rolled on, we shifted to describing images the music painted in our minds. This quickly became a collaboration of what we saw as we described the scene to each other. A story unfolded in front of us, one that we wrote and illustrated together all in the space of fifty-five minutes.

I remember that when the music ended, we just sat there, stunned at what had just unfolded. I had never experienced anything like that before. It was an amazingly beautiful experience that I will never forget.

While sound waves were the first thing that reverberated through our friendship, and we also found plenty to nerd out about, she was also another very special thing to me. It was something I only really came to realize later, with time and reflection. She was my queer elder.

Though we weren't all that different in age, she had navigated queer waters for decades with her beloved wife. She gave so much to me as I navigated my first tentative steps out in the world, from being there for me the time I cried in the bathroom at work over the comments I got after coming out, giving me the space that I so desperately needed to talk about literally anything about being queer. She listened to all my stories and understood. No judgment whatsoever.

Through that, she helped me build the confidence to become the person I am today, where I hope I can give the same to others as well. I was only just beginning my experiences in that world and I don't know if I had anything to offer, but I hope that in other ways, through our friendship and giving space to each other, I offered half as much to her as she did to me.

Our friendship continued for years, through the beginnings of the universal upheaval that covid brought as well as other major changes in my own life. We talked about many things, shallow and deep, regularly and irregularly. She remained a fixture in my world at that time, when I could count the things I was sure of on one hand.

We kept in touch up through the early summer of 2021, when one morning, she posted some of her usual cheery morning posts to Cybrespace, then a few days later, we had a pleasant, if brief, text exchange. After that, nobody I know of heard from her ever again.

I thought for a bit that she was just on a bit of a break, and would be back. Over time, though I realized something had happened—she was gone. I still have the text app we were on, one that nobody else uses, just in case. But it's been silent.

I've listened to Magic Night exactly once since I lost touch with her, last year. I don't remember what I felt at the time; I did not happen to write anything down in my journal about it.

I probably tried to remember some of the pictures we'd painted in our minds about the music. I'm sure I cried and I'm sure I needed to. I'm sure I'd try to do exactly that again next time I had the emotional strength to. That experience is forever tied to that music.

What I do know for sure is that I've wanted to, for some time now, commit what Val meant to me to words. Words that would shine brightly, be something to commemorate what she meant to me, and not just be something that I would hide away. That's what I've tried to do here. Tried to make sure that she would not be forgotten.

Much like how every February, I'll try to remember to celebrate her birthday with a little post in the fediverse, in that space where a handful of people also still remember her. Try to bring out a little bit of her by evoking the energy of connections she made.

I believe that those who were close to us leave a deep imprint on us, and while I do not believe people who are gone actually still exist in this world, I do believe that the marks they left on our lives paint beautiful pictures, sound like wondrous music, make us experience deep feeling. You know—something we can sense if we close our eyes and open our hearts on a magic night.

If you're out there, still, somewhere, I hope you are well… my dear, dear friend. And whether you are, or even if you're not… you're here. In these words, and here, in me. Thank you.