In August of 2022, I met Kenzie.
We’d both followed a discord server invite link seen in passing on our Tumblr dashboards – me first, then Kenzie a handful of days later. The server was a brand new, open-invite community for fans of the popular manga/anime One Piece, and I’d only very recently made confluent decisions to start rewatching One Piece from the beginning, to return to Tumblr after several years of inactivity, and finally to seek out other One Piece fans to try and recreate those halcyon days ten years back when I ran a moderately popular fan blog. That last part never really happened – I never got back into creating gifs and graphics, nor have I hung on to many of the connections I made upon my return – but I did join that Discord server. And I did meet Kenzie.
The server took off – for the thirty of us who joined, and particularly for the five to fifteen of us who remained active the longest. I was the only Kiwi, and one of only a few who didn’t live in the contiguous United States. We had members from North Carolina, from Florida, from New York, from Oklahoma. Chile, too. After the server gates closed and membership became direct-invite only, we gained and then lost some weird guy from Ohio.
We spent hours in voice chat several times a week goofing off, playing Jackbox games, watching YouTube videos. We loved each other – endlessly, it seemed. Anyone who has never joined an internet community and immediately become part of a freakishly tight-knit, incestuously obsessed larger body, made of people who were just days ago complete and utter strangers, could never understand. It is, to me, a singularly intense social experience. And of course there’s always a physical removal with internet friendships, so we found connection in heightened emotions, secrets, promises.
It was fantastic, and deeply sad. Thirty people; in just over two years (though really within nine months) it was all gone.
Oh, I’m sure the server’s still out there, kicking about like every once-loved pigeon the world over – but by the time I finally bit the bullet and left in June 2024 we had three active members and no end to repetitive “how are you?”s and “sorry that happened”s and “I love the taste and feel of Oklahoma dirt”s. Nobody stepped outside of general chat, despite that the list of sub-chats stretched far below the boundaries of my laptop screen. White names (signs of a departed account) littered the intro channel like bleached bones. The whole place felt like a monument to foolish hope.
Such a large group of mentally ill Tumblr users could not last in any meaningful way for too long a time. I’ve heard of far worse falling-outs, far more absurd tales of petty drama, but that hardly matters – the mods mismanaged a few interpersonal grievances, a sad girl from Alabama living in New York fell into unrequited obsession, and a creep from Ohio was unceremoniously removed after events in New Orleans. With all of that and more, we drifted away one by one. I, ever the optimist, was one of the last to leave.
Through this, there was Kenzie. A fiercely intelligent lawyer from Louisiana who hit up my direct messages one day in September 2022 with a list of prompts for a Halloween writing challenge. Of course I hardly knew her at that point, but there was something about the way she spoke and the way she laughed that immediately drew me to her.
It seemed that magnetism was apparent to a number of others in the server; Kenzie appearing in voice chat would always elicit a certain reaction. Some of it was surprise, because Kenzie could be elusive, especially when ten or more of us were gathered to talk shit about That Guy From One Piece, but a certain part of it felt like an exhaled breath. That Louisiana drawl would wash over us as she recounted some crazy story from court or showed up on video with her dachshund Minnie, before her hand would come down on the mute button and she’d stay quietly for a while, only resurfacing to answer a question or, eventually, to say goodbye. More often than not she’d take the Irish exit, only leaving a message in text-for-voice-chat so that all eight or nine of us could respond and say “byeeee Kenzie”, followed by as many red and purple heart emojis as we needed.
This is to say – we all loved each other, but many of us were a little bit in love with Kenzie.
Less than seven months after joining that server, Kenzie and I met in person for the first time. Kenzie – along with our friend from North Carolina – collected me and our Ohioan creep (we didn’t know he was a creep back then) from Baton Rouge airport. It was day one of our ten day Mardi Gras trip, and having flown from Aotearoa New Zealand I’d travelled as far as all of them put together, and more. I held Kenzie’s hand across the centre console of the car almost the entire way back to Lafayette, where we’d repose with the others for a day before going to meet the rest of the group in NOLA. There we’d find warm winds blowing between the beams of a tiny front porch, a king-sized bed dressed in pristine white linen, and a backyard purpose-made for sitting and smoking weed smuggled by car from Oklahoma. Our Floridian (now a Washingtonian, and still a good friend of mine) cooked up tortillas and meat on the barbeque; we took group photos; we read books and drank beer on the porch; we ate Kenzie’s gumbo for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; and on Fat Tuesday, we got shitfaced and rowdy on Bourbon Street.
I could say “and the rest is history”. Of course it is, technically, but nothing is ever easy.
After ten days together, only one of which we spent without an army of drunk and/or high Americans claiming our (drunk/high) attention, life demanded that I fly back to Aotearoa New Zealand, to return to work, and to replace the money I’d spent at art markets and bars and Walmarts and restaurants in Lafayette and New Orleans.
Late in 2022, less than two months before Mardi Gras, I had asked Kenzie to be my girlfriend, and I’d wrapped my arms around her at the airport in Feb 2023 and felt I’d never let go; yet there I was at home again. Surrounded by the art I’d collected in NOLA, back in my bed with my big t-shirt on, thinking about logging into work the next day (not knowing that very soon I’d be isolating with COVID, likely contracted from that petri dish of a thirteen-hour flight). I had $40 in my bank account, and I was deeply sad.
It was just… tremendously unfair.
So four months later, I went back. Alone. I saved up just enough to cover my flights and a few weeks of holidaying, and met Kenzie in Houston. We stayed there for four days, then drove over to Lafayette. Three weeks just for us; and then, inevitably, home again.
This is the curse of long-distance lovers – this back and forth, this saving up and spending, this uncertainty. We have to be so, so intentional with our time and our love. If we fall ill and can’t bring ourselves to the phone, if we weather major life events and must recount them digitally, and if the money is slow and our frustrations are high and a storm hits and some motherfucker at a red light rear-ends us and we move house and we’re stressed out of our minds and and and
So in March 2024 I obtained a longer-stay visa from the US consulate in Tāmaki Makaurau, and we began to make plans. For a while it was “save up and come over for a couple of months”, but life and love demanded, eventually, that I quit my job of 6+ years, sell my car, pack up my things, and say goodbye to Te Whanganui-a-Tara for a good long while.
That, I suppose, brings me here. 10.20PM on Sunday, November 3rd 2024. I’m flying out of Wellington on Saturday, to weather major life events with Kenzie, with my love. I haven’t held her in almost eighteen months. This time, spent on applications and collecting paychecks and writing lists and going to therapy and buying big t-shirts that we can both wear, has passed so slowly and so quickly all at once.
The biggest and best thing is that we made it, and that we’ll continue to make it. You, my friend, are welcome to follow along if you like.
Love,
Rosie