COLUMNIST — MAX WALLIS
Loss and regret
The reason we didn’t meet much towards your last years was that I agonised each and every time we had sex. Neither of us could have known how few years you had left. We didn’t know how few the days we had together.
I was selfish and coarse. To see you was to succumb to the most base desire, to yield to the inevitable. I came up with excuses not to see you – to only see you in the glare of a cinema screen, watching Marvel films, where we would drink too much, and fumble, smirk and kiss but no more. We could blame the kiss on the drink.
We first met online eight years before. You were a couple of years older than me, I was at Manchester University and you were in London. It was a time when I had few gay friends and you represented so much more than a muscley blond geek in London. You were a repository of knowledge, of fandom, of kindness. I’m not sure I ever told you how grateful I was for your words of wisdom: what lube to buy, what kink lit your fi re. You would send me comics to read and I devoured them. When you died, your mum sent me four of your books to keep for ever.
We do not appreciate people — not truly — until they are gone.
We met one night in the summer of 2015. We kissed, drunk as skunks, and slept on the sofa to awake with vice- grip hangovers crushing us.
I remember you playing Final Fantasy XV and you saying how much you wanted to get it soon. I remember your breath, how it smelled of something awful. It turned out it was the cancer you didn’t know you had. Within three weeks you were in hospital. Lymphoma, or a swollen spleen, like an inflated baby, you told me on WhatsApp. I asked to visit, you told me your family and friends were there, that the prognosis wasn’t good.
Then... nothing. Two WhatsApp messages, ticks for ever consigned to the empty ether between mobile phones that no longer connect.
This absence, this sudden cutting off , haunts me even now, my dear friend. Partly for what could have been. And in part, because I wasn’t there for you when you needed me most. I was not there to hold your hand in the hospital. And worst, because I actively did not see you, all because I thought we would fuck.
But now I cannot even tell you how much you meant to me because you’re gone, and I know that I ought to have made time, or to have taken the risk. Because now you are gone and my cowardice is like a pall. Never will I let something so trivial as sex get in the way again. I miss you.
“I wasn’t there to hold your hand and now my cowardice is like a pall”