Meeting Mary

I want to start with a sentence I already know is too big, and then spend the rest of this trying to earn it. Meeting Mary was like an angel came down from the heavens. I know how that sounds. It is dramatic, it is over the top, and if I read it on someone else’s blog I would roll my eyes a little. But from where I was standing in January 2020, right before the whole world tilted, it is the honest version. The right person showed up at exactly the right time, and she is still here in 2026, and I have run out of smaller words for what that has meant.

Becoming Jones

By January 2020 I had been playing FreeSO, the fan-built revival of The Sims Online, for about a year. I had spent years quietly hoping someone would rebuild that game, and somehow kept missing it whenever it was actually playable, so by the time I got in for good I was making up for lost time.

The big thing I had learned between the original game and this one was about how to play it. When I was a kid in The Sims Online, my mistake was wanting to be the owner. I would build my own home, my own lot, my own little kingdom, because owning something gives you total control and that felt good. But a game like this is far more fun when you stop trying to run the place and start showing up for other people’s ideas. I am, it turns out, a great support-role person. I love taking someone else’s concept and treating it as seriously as my own, making their thing better instead of needing it to be mine.

I had two characters. The first was Maury, the same Maury I played in the original game twenty years earlier, same body, same clothes, same head, a kind of reincarnation, with the longer hair and the slightly gothic DragonSiblings look I had as a teenager. Maury was the one I played first and longest. But pretty early on I built a second persona, and he is the one who took over. His name was Jones. I gave him a face with a built-in smile, so he was always grinning, dressed him in modern clothes, and freed him from any of my own rules. Jones existed to show up, be funny, be encouraging, and have a good time.

The old Sims Online ads said something like be who you want to be. As a shy, introverted kid, the only thing I ever did with that was be myself, which is fine, but quiet. As an adult on FreeSO I finally understood the offer. I could be anybody. I wanted Jones to be a real part of me, the outgoing part, but turned up and pointed outward.

The Union Hall

So Jones spent his time at a lot called the Union Hall, run by a player named Patience. The Union Hall was an entertainment lot, which in this game meant its whole job was to fill your fun and social bars back up after a long stretch of grinding skills. You would come in, ask someone to dance, and watch your little meters climb out of the red. Patience was one of the core players on the server, the kind who is online basically all the time, running bingo nights and giving money away, always there to talk to somebody. Because she was always around, she did not really need an assistant, so I rarely showed up as Maury to help run the place. I showed up as Jones, to be a regular.

Mary was a regular too. Her character was named Zombella, and Zombella was a zombie who owned a Halloween-themed house, which tells you almost everything about Mary up front: she loves Halloween, loves Christmas, loves decorating for both, in the game and in real life. We had crossed paths plenty of times without it meaning anything yet. Just two people who happened to be at the same bar most nights.

”I need a new show to watch”

One ordinary day at the Union Hall, Mary typed into the general chat: hey everybody, I am so bored, I need a new show to watch.

At that point I had started teaching myself Japanese, and I had just finished a season of a Japanese reality show called Terrace House. The season was Opening New Doors, and I loved everything about it, the people, the music, the gentleness of it. It is sort of like Big Brother if Big Brother were wholesome, six strangers sharing a house and just slowly getting to know each other, and on top of that it was a soft, lovely window into everyday life in Japan, which was exactly where my head already was. So I blurted it out the way you do: you should watch Terrace House.

She took the recommendation about half-jokingly, but she genuinely wanted something new, so she actually went and watched it. Then a month or so went by, because back then we did not talk outside the game at all. The next time we ran into each other she said something like, oh my god, I started watching that show, it is so good, thank you, this is such a good recommendation. And I said: it really is, you should message me on Discord, and once you finish this season we can watch the other ones together.

She was in immediately. And that became the spine of the whole friendship. We watched every season of Terrace House together, me half for the Japanese listening practice and half because it is just a wonderful, calming show, and somewhere in there we stopped being two people who liked the same show and started being friends.

My pandemic friend

The timing of all this still amazes me. I met Mary in January 2020, and within a couple of months the world locked down. She became, in the most literal sense, my pandemic friend. We met right at the edge of it, while everything was still normal, and then went through the entire strange thing side by side.

I needed her more than I knew. I had just changed jobs, getting off the every-day commute I had been doing forever. And I was in the early, confusing days of losing a close friendship I had had for about ten years. I did not fully understand yet that it was ending, but it was, and I spent most of 2020 turning it over in my head, trying to make sense of how something that solid could come apart. Into all of that walked Mary, with no idea she was arriving at exactly the right moment, and she has been steady ever since.

She was also useful in a way I did not see coming. Mary had worked in emergency preparedness out in Washington State, so when the pandemic hit she did not panic, she got practical. She was the one telling me to stock up sensibly, order masks, get hand sanitizer, set ourselves up so we were not scrambling later. While everyone was inside washing their hands and wiping down groceries and quietly losing it, I had someone calm to talk to. That counted for a lot in a year that was lonely for almost everybody.

I should mention the part we never tiptoe around, because it is part of what I love about us. When we met she was about thirty years older than me, roughly the distance between me and my own parents, who are pushing seventy now. Mary knows she is the older one and says so plainly, and I am saying it plainly here, and somehow it has never once felt like a division. It is just a funny, good fact about us: I have a best friend who is closer to my mom’s age than mine, and none of it matters.

Out of that came our running bit. If too many days go by without a word, one of us fires off a one-word check-in: Alive?, or, just as often, the grimmer version, Dead? Either way it is a joke and a real nudge at once, a way of saying hey, it has been a few days, I would love to hear from you. And the answer is always some version of yep, still dead, followed by whatever has been eating the time. Dead because work. Dead because the refrigerator broke. Dead because the grandkids. It is the perfect setup for complaining about whatever has had you hostage lately. One day, of course, one of us actually will be, and that will be genuinely sad, and also, knowing us, a tiny bit funny.

Signal, and biscuit dog

For a while we talked on Discord, which was fine until I realized I was missing her messages, because I keep Discord notifications off to survive the noise. So I told her we should just text. Except this was 2020, she had an Android phone, I had an iPhone, and the two still did not really speak to each other: no good photos, no video, none of the rich stuff. So I went looking for something in the middle and found Signal, and we both moved over to it as our main line, because there we could send real pictures and videos back and forth.

And we do, constantly. She sends me a pizza, I send her tacos or a photo of my cat. She sends me her dog Lucy, who I came to know as biscuit dog, because Lucy lives for biscuits. Years of ordinary little images of each other’s days, which is most of what a long friendship actually is.

Holidays in a game

The other thing that happened in 2020 is that the friendship spilled out of FreeSO and into Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which came out right as the lockdowns hit and turned out to be exactly the soft, slow escape the whole planet needed at once. For Mary and me it became the second place we lived. We both eventually got the online subscription so we could visit each other’s islands, trade fruit, do the fishing and bug-catching tournaments, argue about which villagers to keep and which to evict, and just walk around appreciating the giant places we were each building.

What got me most was the holidays. That first year you could not really be with your family on the actual days, so we celebrated in the game instead. The Fourth of July, the Turkey Day event at Thanksgiving, Christmas, Halloween, all of it, decorated and observed on our islands the same way we decorated our lots back in FreeSO. Two people in completely different parts of the country, different generations even, finding holidays to share through a video game because the real ones were on hold.

Which brings me to the snowmen. For the last couple of Christmases FreeSO was alive, Mary and I ran a holiday house together. It started as her idea, a Christmas house, and per my whole philosophy I just grabbed her concept and ran as hard as I could with it. Every year the final prize from the in-game Christmas tree was a red-hatted snowman that, unlike a snowman you built yourself out of snowballs, never melted. You could keep him out all year. At some point I noticed people were selling these snowmen cheap, way under what they were worth, so I started buying every single one I could find. I cornered the entire snowman market. I wish I had kept the final count, because I definitely counted at the time, but eventually the inside and outside of our house were completely packed with red-hatted snowmen, hundreds of them, and we moved the whole lot up into the snowy mountains so they made sense year round. Naturally, once everyone realized how good the object was, the price shot through the roof, but by then I already had my hoard. It is the most on-brand thing I have ever done in a game, and I loved it.

The little things

Here is what Mary actually taught me. She has never once forgotten my birthday. Every year, at minimum, a message or a card, and often more: a peach pie, a box of cookies, some small trinket that says I am thinking about you, I appreciate you. The lesson buried in that is that little acts of kindness go a long way, especially in a friendship that lives on a screen, where you cannot just go get lunch. So I started doing it too. I send my friends cookies on their birthdays now, little snacks at the right moments, and it genuinely deepens things. I learned that from her.

And we have been through the real stuff. My cat developed kidney disease, and Mary was there for it. Lucy, biscuit dog, kept getting lumps and bumps, and a couple of them turned out to be cancer, and we got through those together too. Mary has called me with her own health scares, and we talked through them. We have helped each other survive the death of a parent. There is almost nothing left that we have not told each other.

People keep wanting me to name what she is, and I keep failing at it. She is not a mom to me, not a sister, not a grandma, even though she is around those ages, and reaching for any of those words feels wrong the moment I try it. She is just a profoundly good friend, the kind that runs past the ordinary meaning of the word. When I am sick she asks how I am doing. When I am sad she knows the exact right thing to say. And it goes both ways: if she has a problem, I am in, all the way, whatever it takes.

Meeting in person

In the summer of 2022 I finally got to meet her. We took a trip to Washington State, where I climbed Mount Rainier and touched the Pacific for the first time, and where, after more than two years of Mary being a person on a screen, I drove to her actual house. She cooked Mexican food for us, I finally got to meet biscuit dog in the fur, and she sent me back to the hotel with an entire lemon cake, this absurdly good one from a company called the Cakerie that I had been mailing her as a birthday gift for years and that you genuinely cannot get in St. Louis. Standing in her real neighborhood, a place I had only ever heard about, was one of the strangest and best feelings: putting a true location to someone who had lived in my phone.

I also got to repay her a little. I am a teriyaki fanatic, and out there I discovered Toshi’s Teriyaki, which Seattle basically invented its own version of. Mary had lived right by one for years and somehow never tried it, so I made her go. Now it is a staple of hers, and she will send me a photo of her Toshi’s order specifically to make me jealous, which works every time.

Still here

We have talked nearly every single day since 2020. Not every day, there are stretches where I am traveling or she is busy raising her grandkids, Jackson and Veronica, and that is what the check-in is for, but the line has basically never gone quiet. She is the kindest person I have ever met. The universe handed me a friendship I did not earn and did not see coming, at the precise moment I needed it, and it has only grown since.

I keep telling myself I need to get back out to Washington more than I do. Between a full-time job and a home and pets and a relationship, the time and the distance are real, and I never manage it as often as I want. But that is a logistics problem, not a friendship problem. The friendship is the surest thing I have. This is the first version of Mary’s story, and I am glad it gets to be an open one, because we are nowhere near done.