‘Do not contact me again’: The sudden death of a friendship

The words leapt off the screen and entered my body physically, like bullets. “F--- off. Do not contact me again. This is no joke.”

Thus ended a friendship of 25 years that began in interminable international text conversations in the late 1990s via the dial-up ether of Internet Relay Chat (IRC), then blossomed into me travelling halfway around the world from Sydney to small-town Virginia in the United States for a remarkable 10 days in the middle of 2001, the year that gave the world 9/11.

Where did it all go wrong?Credit: Fairfax Media

My first reaction was a kind of injured anger. When I checked, he’d killed and removed our lengthy Facebook messenger screed, volumes of expression flushed like a loo. He’d vanished from my Facebook friends list and our shared Dropbox was denuded. A bit pathetically, I retaliated. I unfriended his new squeeze and the few cronies we still had in common. But when my indignation lowered to a simmer, I began to reflect on our friendship.

I’ll never forget the intoxication of first meeting Stu – and Ellen, a woman we both knew only from our longstanding IRC group, who had travelled across the US from Missouri to be with us. The three of us cackled and crackled like a house on fire on the drive from the airport, countless hours of internet chats in the years previous having created a solid foundation for this lively, easy repartee.

As he plonked our bags on the kitchen floor and welcomed us into his large but modest home in the middle of nowhere, I realised with a shiver that we’d put our trust in a funny, handsome, incredibly talented bear of a man, with a beard like Moses and a rusty chortle for a laugh, who was, in fact, a perfect stranger.

The shiver didn’t last long. Stu was the friend I’d wanted all my life. Our musical influences, tending toward Celtic folk and rock, ran like train lines. What a thing it was to sit in his garden and just start playing guitar and mandolin together, anywhere in the middle of, say, a 20-minute Mike Oldfield piece, to fly with gusto into the familiar themes and not look down.

But reality intruded. Stu’s kids had school, his wife had work, and, after a few days, Ellen needed to get back home for her children. Which left the two of us, Stu and me, to get high and stumble around Washington DC like Cheech and Chong, to visit Baltimore and to consider Tennessee.

So where did it all go wrong? Incredibly, 9/11 was 22 years ago. A lot of water has flowed down the Hudson since then. We remained Facebook friends but rarely chatted as the years rolled by.

I put a lot of my life on social media, Stu has always been less forthcoming. Which led me to wonder if the end, when it came, was about aspects of my life catalogued in probably a little too much detail online, as well as the ultimate insult to come.

Saying ‘Don’t ever contact me again’ means there can never be any kind of explanation.

In 2019, my partner and I had four days in New York, where Stu had been living for years. A flurry of emails saw him rearranging his workday to fit us in. Accidentally, he included in the body of one of those emails a conversation with Ellen, saying that even if he and I did catch up, it wouldn’t amount to much more than a quick hello and goodbye.

As it happened, the night before we were due to meet up with him, we got hopelessly lost in New York City. And we fought, as travelling couples do. And it was exhausting. And the thought of another day of finding our way around this magnificent but perplexing city to yet another new destination was dismaying. So I sent an email, begging off, explaining that we were so tired from our misadventure and would he be terribly upset if we let it go this time? I didn’t hear back. Home in Sydney a few days later, I sent a casual email. Which elicited his curt, final response.

The terrible finality of things, from the end of a career to the end of a friendship, should never be engineered in haste, or from a position of pique. For there can be no going back.

The idea of saying “Don’t ever contact me again” means there can never be any kind of explanation. One of the two people required for a friendship has declared themselves judge, jury and executioner. It’s a full stop born of anger and disappointment when a comma, a little pause, might have done. Yet it is an ending, in a world where most of us are content to let old friendships simply shrivel and wither on the vine.

When I pushed my dented ego aside, what I remembered was his kindness and generosity, his hearty laugh and the joy he seemed to take in knowing me. And for that, for knowing him and loving him as I did, I realised that I’m truly grateful.

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