Ian...

Musical introduction: dan le sac vs Scroobius Pip - Stunner

"OK, look. 
"'You're good at this 'empathy' shit, right?
"So I want you to put yourself in the position of this guy I know."

"Alright."

"He's been dumped out of the blue, he's trying to be a good guy about it.
"He knows she's got her own shit going on, but so does he. 
"He's feeling lost, he's feeling alone. 
"He's trying to be noble, but this is hurting. 
"What would you say... 
"Fucking... 
"Can you please for fuck's sake let yourself be angry and stop trying to take care of everyone around you?" 

"I appreciate what you're trying to say and I'll absolutely take that on-board because there's a ring of truth to it and I'll certainly consider applying self-care but..."

"FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER FUCKING FUCK!" I growled, waving both middle-fingers at my webcam. 

Because no matter how much I might try to apply ethical frameworks to the world around me, Ian is the best of all of us; if you ever want to know what hill I will willingly die on tomorrow, look to windward and see where Ian is standing now. 

Because no matter how sick I am of how that guy always makes me look bad by comparison, I hope he never stops. 

Where for most people I have anecdotes to illustrate a narrative, for Ian I have only sentiment.
Where for most people I use allegory to illuminate, Ian has always been luminary.
Where for most people I try to set an example by which to lead, Ian is someone I try to exemplify so that one day he may lead us all. 

Hoobastank - Born To Lead

Not that he ever would, because whilst he'd appreciate the sentiment he'd assure you that there are other luminaries who can bring a more expansive skill-set to bear on that particular requirement and, as flattered as he is to be considered, he's comfortable engaging in a supporting role and would hate to tread on the toes of others who... 

would walk the fuck over him because their hubris was greater than his humility.  

But if there was anyone's army I'd volunteer to lead simply because I know he'd never ask, it would be Ian's. 

The story of how Ian and my lives intersected is as annoying to attempt to retell as it is to remember; we met at a party, and the rest is a history which I'm long past caring about. Regardless, I owe a debt of gratitude to Jenna for the part she played in bringing us together. Sifting my memory, a better one works its way to the surface: 

Back in October last year, Ian pinged me randomly with a link to the Good Things Festival saying, "BTW, this festival is on in Sydney the day after my conference. I suppose I may as well." 
"Hook me up, I'll meet you there. 
"I said that BEFORE I looked down and saw Enter Shikari, Hanabie... JEBEDIAH???
"DAFUQWAT?"
"Leave it with me," he replied, stealing one of my favourite lines. 
"FUCK YOU!
"Oh gods, I'm defensive. 
"How are you better at my catch-phrases than I am? So naturally?" 

He chose, wisely, not to respond, but a couple of days later a ticket landed offhandedly in my inbox by way of reply. 

After PayID'ing him, we caught up in Perth a couple of weeks later (see #perthistential crisis), and when I got back to Canberra I booked seats on the Murray's service to-and-from Sydney, as well as a place to stay so I wouldn't have to try driving there and back the same day. Then, in early December I headed up and managed to catch the tail-end of Enter Shikari, then all of Hanabie, at one end of the event before meeting him up during Sepultura at the other. As I made my way over I happened to be passing the main stage where Slowly Slowly were playing their one song I knew, a cover of a Blink 182 song I've always felt sentimental for, so I stopped and listened; leaning against the fence around a lighting rig with a stupid grin lighting up my face, it was a perfect fucking moment. 

Shortly afterwards I was sitting under the shade of one of the few trees inside the perimeter at Centennial Park, listening to Corey Taylor belt out Before I Forget, filling my sweetest friend in on the fascinating Redheaded Distraction (aka Bridget) I'd met shortly after I saw him last: 

Storytime continued as we shifted back to the left to fulfil my teenage dream of seeing Jebediah live, interrupted whenever "18-year old Pete" had a happy. 

It was a fucking sweet day out, so good even having to evacuate three songs into Fallout Boy's headline performance thanks to an incoming thunderstorm, whilst lightning cracked overhead, and getting drenched to the bone during the downpour which followed couldn't dampen my fondness; but it was nowhere near as sweet as the sorrow I felt saying goodnight later at Sydney Central Station. 

Loyalty can't exist without trust.
Trust can be earned or broken, never bought or sold; somehow I, wherefore I know not, came to find myself in possession of Ian's.
How could I not repay that non-performatively, and in kind, when undeserving as I might be he has been nothing but? 

Rare indeed are people whom I consider a peer, let alone an equal; Ian is one of the rarest kind, who'll ask "How the fuck are you, man?" before I can. 

Where most Aussie Blokes sling shit at each other as a sign of affection, we sling compliments. 
Where most men joust with their phallus, we join the dots with our pens.  
Where most would pontificate, Ian's a man who's sentiment is all-but-silent but speaks Louder Than Words. 

 - 06/01/2024, 00:52

Sandra...

Once upon a time I was sitting in the passenger seat of Sandra's Supercharged Holden Calais and whilst cruising up Flemmington Rd past EPIC I turned to her and asked, "So hey, you and me. How 'bout it?" 

She looked at me with less surprise than someone who didn't know us might expect, laughed and replied, "Nah, wouldn't want to spoil the friendship!" 

"Yeah, fair enough," I shrugged, "figured it was worth asking. You ever change your mind, let me know. So what do you want to do this afternoon? Catch a film or something?"

She never did, which everyone agrees was for the best, and we've been the closest of friends ever after. 

The End. 

Except the story doesn't end there any more than that being where it started. If you want to define nearly two decades of friendship based on as many seconds that probably does the job well enough, so by all means fuck back off to "20 Second Movie Reviews" and feed your short attention span. The real story is like an iceberg - whilst everyone's distracted by the polar bear clinging on for dear life, underneath the surface it's all sea lion-on-penguin carnage whilst the iceberg desperately tries to keep that wayward polar bear from drowning. 

Trying to understand a friendship like Sandra and mine from the highlight-reel is like thinking you've got a good grasp on Fight Club after watching the Trailer; Jack doesn't get Marla at the end, but they do start what comes next together, and just like Marla Singer, Sandra aka Sandra J--- N----- met me at a very strange time of my life. 

I vividly remember the moment she walked into my life, and the back-room of The Civic Hotel, dressed- and dolled-up in a way which nailed the inflection-point of "out to impress" and "but not trying too hard" so perfectly that the only thing more frictionless than her smile was the chocolate wheel spinning to the rattling sound of heads swivelling on creaking necks to see if it landed on "You're A Winner!" or "Better Luck Next Life". I distinctly remember hearing the thud of her Blind Date for the evening Garrick's jaw hitting the floor, which conveniently ensured my inner monologue muttering "Goddamn..." went unheard. 

An hour or so later, after she and Skye (who had helped me broker the event) trounced us at pool at least twice, I turned to him and murmured "If you don't make a move by the end of the next game, I'm going to," which he did, shortly after which the chocolate wheel stopped on the Glittery Gold "Grand Prize" segment. It rested there for the next year or so until eventually she reached up and tipped it over into Monkey-Poo Brown "REJECTED!", but that's not my story to tell. 

By the time that ended, Skye and I had bounced off each other's atmospheres which put me on a collision-course with Amanda, but with interconnected friendship networks, Garrick moving into my share-house, and the general Brownian-motion of social networks when you're in your 20's, there was plenty of opportunity for us to become friends independently of anything else, and that we did. 

It was years later, after Garrick and my friendship dissolved over an altercation at a party where I shirtfronted him for his bullshit behaviour (and in doing prevented his being mauled by two defensive Staffies and a back-yard full of people who were about to beat him down far less gently than I was offering to), and my relationship with Amanda evaporated like dew in the light of dawn in spring, that I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of her Calais, wondering. 

We'd never both been single at the same time, and the usual trigger points for such things had come and gone. We were deep in what you might call "The Friend Zone" for reasons more defined by "the way these things happen" than anything else, but we were tighter than a wog's wallet, and thicker than thieves, and I'd never forgotten that moment I'd first laid eyes on her, or that no threat I ever offered Garrick had been anything less than sincere. 

Sandra could hoist the engine out of a Barina, strip it, replace the gaskets, and have it back on the road in a weekend; she could strip the pride off a bloke half-again her size and bury him in shame in a heartbeat. She'd had more different jobs than I could count, could apply herself seemingly to anything and master it; for all that she'd refer to herself as a dumb under-educated country girl, she could catch up to all the undergrad degrees in the room, and keep up, all whilst pulling out tree stumps, quoting the CWA Cookbook, volunteering for NSW RFS, and pulling a mean burn-out. Here I was sitting across from a girl who could emasculate a backyard full of blokey-blokes by simply being herself and the only reason she didn't run the grill was because she knew how much I enjoyed searing meat, so she let me. 

All of that aside, "She's pretty, and I'm pretty funny," I thought, "and she's awesome, and I tell awesome stories, and she seems to like me, and I'd really like to know." We got along so effortlessly, smoother than cruising in a long-wheelbase tourer riding on well-balanced suspension. "That's what love's all about, isn't it?" 

I was right, but not in the way I was thinking at the time. 

So I asked, the wheel landed on a Warm Amber segment marked "Yeah, nah, but" and we carried on our merry way rejoicing. 

OK, I'll admit I was disappointed, but I refused to let that get in the way, let alone show, and the rejoicing followed in due course so for the purpose of selective-narrative let's just accept it as so. 

A year or so later I was in London having what would best be described as "a pretty hard time", and Sandra was the one who'd Skype me in the depths of my night whilst halo'd in afternoon sunshine from her front verandah and talk me down off the ledge again and again, saying "Remember who you are!". She was the one who told me: 

"remember this, one of the most endearing qualities that you have it that you want to be better and stronger than you were and you are always striving to be happy...... you are better than you believe yourself to be, you just have to look at yourself in the mirror and see what the rest of us see"
the zen art of looking for answers that you know don't exist... 

When I gave up and came home, she had a room set up for me with my own bed made and ready for me to fall into, and a set of keys waiting in the letterbox to let myself in after Scott picked me up from the airport. Sitting across from him at the table I recognised from the background of all those Skype calls I watched her come running up the path in her Independent Property Group pant-suit, sandy-blonde curls bouncing cherubic in the afternoon sun so her feet seemed to barely touch the ground, and the moment she threw herself into my arms I knew I was Home. 

Then she went inside and put the kettle on. 

Interlude:
Ricky: "How's your Sandra post going?"
"I wasn't going to do this in chronological order - with Smeghead I bounced around a lot.
Still, tears aside, I'm liking how this is flowing.
LOL..
'tears'
'flowing'
Sometimes I'm so sharp I cut myself."

A couple of months later her share-house in Garran dissolved and I followed her to Allison's place in Amaroo. In 2009 it seemed the edge of the world; Forde was a Display Village and Bonner the glint in an urban-planner's eye, but Buckingham Palace was home on the other side of Horse Park Drive from the dream of First Home Owner's Grants clad in bucolic pasture. The Mums ruled by fiat, with a Hoover-branded Sceptre held in bright-yellow cleaning glove-clad fists, but whilst I was woken every Saturday morning by the beating of a vacuum-head against my bedroom door my world was was filled with the cooing of a Laughing Turtledove, a kettle never far from boiling, and (when I felt motivated) the smell of fresh-baked scones. 
We had a freeloader who's name became FUCK YA! in my memory after Sandra tore strips off her one night (Allison and I hid in the corridor throughout prevaricating whether to intercede or break out the Corpse Disposal Kit). 
FUCK YA! departed shortly thereafter in Absolutely Not Suspicious Circumstances, to be replaced by Skye. 
The Porkening and The Porkening II: I Porked Them Good will forever go down in legend; not just because I cook a mean pork-roast, but because they resulted in 15 Minutes Of Silence. 
It was a good life, but as with all good things... 

I met Emma on a trip to Perth, and after an intense long-distance romance wrought of loneliness and a desperation for connection I found myself driving across the Nullarbor with Scott in the passenger seat of my tetris-packed Audi and Sandra waving tearfully from the doorstep of Buckingham Palace in my rear-view mirror. 

Musical interlude: Gotye - Save Me

Years later Emma was a traumatic memory, Jenna was my here-and-now, and my phone rang with Sandra's name on the Caller ID. 

"What are you doing on September 9th?" 
I think for a moment before answering, "Drinking Hefeweizen Dunkel in Berlin."
"What?"
"Hey, you asked, and on that day I'll be in Berlin so statistically... Why? You didn't go and do something silly like booking your wedding without checking with me first or something did you?"
"... HOW THE FUCK AM I GOING TO GET MARRIED WITHOUT YOU GIVING A SPEECH AND INSULTING EVERYONE?
"And, yes.
"Bastard!" 
What can I say? I have something of a reputation. 
"OK, let me think... actually, I have an idea."
"Oh?" 
"Leave it with me."

I hang up, and call Scott. 

"Dude!" 
"Dude, so I got a call from Sandra..."
"Yeah? So you going to get back for the wedding?" 
"Yeah about that," I explain the scheduling conflict, "but I got an idea. I was thinking: how about I write something and get you to read it?"
"Yeah I can do that. We've got time. Get it over to me, we'll workshop it, make it happen."
"Yeah, about that. I was thinking, y'know, for comedic value, maximum impact, what if I put something together and send it over to a 3rd party and they hand it to you in a sealed envelope and you open it 'The Winner Is...'-style on stage and you read it sight-unseen." 
"You... but... what... dammit! How do I let you talk me into this shit?"
"Because you know it'll be awesome, man. It always is."
"... fucking..."
"Leave it with me." 

8 months later, after hours of writing all of that and more into the script, editing, rehearsing on passing strangers who knew none of these people, pouring more than a decade of adoration onto the page, agonising, culling, adding, removing, then editing some more, performing it again and again until I wasn't just sure it sounded right, but that it would sound like it was me saying it when read by Scott, Allison handed Scott a sealed envelope in front of nearly 100 people. He opened it, and proceeded to read, whilst in Germany I drank Hefeweizen Dunkel and waited for scantily-clad himbo-assassins from the Firefighters Calendar to descend and turn me into a greasy red smear on the Fredrichschain pavement because from the far side of the globe I had managed to Rickroll a wedding (for the second time) by proxy so adeptly that even the proxy didn't see it coming (although Skye, I'm told, caught it 5 or 10 seconds out). 

"Has it happened? How did it go?" I messaged, anxious to know how much longer I had to kiss my girlfriend goodbye. 
"Yes, and Sandra says 'You're an unbelievable bastard', and 'she loves you'."
"I love her too."

To this day, the feeling remains mutual ever after. 

Smeghead...

A long time ago in a high school far far away, a not-yet bearded nerdboi and an obnoxious little shit became friends. 

Actually, "friends" is too strong a term. Let me reframe. 

Once upon a time in a misogyny-and-homophobia incubatorCatholic All Boys School run by soon-to-be-convicted-paedophilesThe Christian Brothers which smelled of anxious conformity, unwashed socks, burgeoning testosterone, furtive (occasionally mutual, I'm told) masturbation, and a less-than-subtle undertone of Lord of the Flies, a small group of outcasts accumulated. We were nicknamed "The Cool Gang", and somewhere along the line I became its leader... in that the rest of the group could generally be found on the opposite side of me from the bullies. One of that group was a weedy lad named Leith C****** R****** who never missed the opportunity to tell you about how he was in the Air Force Cadets and reminded me of Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf, so I took to calling him Smeghead. 

For the longest time I thought he was pretty fucking annoying, but The Cool Gang never excluded a member because "safety in numbers", and... well there wasn't really anywhere downstream for someone to go. We were the outliers; we played Chess, or Suicide Chess, or Magic: The Gathering, or D&D, or Lacrosse, were hyper-clever, or functionally retarded, on weird scholarships for Academic Achievement or Organ Playing (the one with pipes and a keyboard, not another masturbation reference), the awkward, the uncoordinated, the Mad Scientists (one guy made his own taser out of 9V batteries and copper wire coils in ~year 9), the Terminally Inept, the hadn't-hit-growth-spurts-yet, the already-6-foot-tall-at-14. We, the unco, the nerdy, who fit in with none of the cliques, collected in one corner of the playground near the Library, and kept each other company (and occasionally from being beaten up by the rugby playing jocks). 

I never really liked him all that much in high school; I mostly thought of him as an annoying hanger-on, and I remember mostly just putting up with him because he was just this-side of being irritating enough to punch. Still, he invited me to his birthday party out of the blue one year, and we bonded over our mutual love of Pink Floyd (I later gave him the Super-Audio CD High Bitrate Remastered edition of the Wish You Were Here Album for his 20th or 21st birthday). 

He was one of the two who dragged me off the last of the bullies I beat up in Year 10, and made an effort to keep in contact as we were winding up Year 12; somehow when the rest of them fell away he remained. 

He'd come to my parties.
We'd go body-surfing for fitness and fun (and a bit of a perv) in the summer.
He worked at the local Sizzler, so I'd go out for a cheap feed.
We both go into wine wankery - he worked for Sandalford Estate for a bit, and I worked for Saracen (plus I'm a wanker). 

Whilst our adventures weren't by any means the Stuff of Legend (the escapades I collaborated on with Sharpie, the Silent Bob to my Jay, transcended fame into infamy), a bond was formed which survived his finishing uni and heading over to ADFA, various postings, and long stretches of distance and time. 

I visited him in Brisbane because fuck-it-why-not, when he was posted at RAAF Amberley (I vaguely remember being driven up to Sunshine Coast to fix his nan's computer as being an excuse?), then again to stand as his Best Man when he married Esther.
We hung out in Canberra when they were posted back here between my returning from London and moving back to Perth.
I visited him again in the Blue Mountains when I was in Sydney for orientation day at AGSM (before I restarted my MBA with Ducere).
I missed his mum Rhonda's funeral because of time-frames and covid restrictions.
I managed to procure two high-end monitors for his twin sons at the behest of his dad Cameron during the peak of hardware shortages and had them drop-shipped to Canberra just in time for Xmas in 2021, which I sold him for Cost-Price+A-Mars-Bar (literally rounded up by $1 to $300 per unit when the market price was $450).
But I was here in Canberra in July of last year when Cameron passed away after a long battle with cancer. 

The night before his wedding we stayed in a hotel in the Brisbane CBD (he and Esther were living together by then, so this meant they could at least pretend to observe some of the tradition) and decided to eat at the nearby Sizzler for "old time's sake" (and because we thought it was hilarious, and because neither of us was particularly rolling in cash), then his "buck's party" involved us sitting around the dingy hotel room we were stating in, sharing the best whisky I could afford. 

So when he messaged me saying Cameron had gone I threw my phone over my shoulder in the middle of the discussion I was having about IT Security Policy, finished whiteboarding the gap-analysis we were doing, picked it up again to reply "well shit." and went looking for an appropriate bottle. 

It took a few stops to find, but whilst showing Ian around we found ourselves in Manuka and I ducked us into the Vintage Cellars wherein I found what I was looking for. 

I've been fond of Oban whisky for ages, since I found it on special and decided to try it. It used to be my "keep some in the cupboard for a special occasion, or Tuesday (whichever comes first)" until the price started creeping up. I was exchanging bottles with a client in Melbourne for a while - he sent one when I told him I'd got my marks and had officially passed my MBA - I knocked off work early, poured a glass, plonked a couple of ice cubes in it, and took a photo from my infamous Friday chair of it alongside an empty glass with the bottle in the background. He sent one back a short time later, of the same arrangement on his balcony; one glass with whisky, and the other empty but for a couple of ice cubes. Pete's a good client, and a great guy. 

This was a Limited Edition called The Tale of Twin Foxes, which sat nicely with me in the context of me and Smeghead, particularly the blurb at the bottom of the box: 

Sweet, for how life is supposed to be.
Salt, for tears at a funeral.
Smoke, for a cremation. 

It was special because it was a Limited Edition, but at $200 it was also modest because that was Cameron; I thought he'd have approved of the effort and consideration, but also that I didn't go all overboard over it (Smeghead agreed). 

So the day after I watched a short-but-sweet ceremony over Zoom as a grid of people I didn't know sat alone with their grief and cried on webcams and Cameron went up in smoke to the sound of On The Turning Away, I Ubered out to Moncrief and cracked open the bottle. 

It was a pleasant evening - we spoke very little of the day before, or Cameron, although Smeghead did say at one point, with a wry smile, how amused he was that the song his casually racist dad had picked was a song admonishing racism. 

When I left there was just a small bit left in the bottle - enough for one more stiff pour. I have no idea whether it's still there on his shelf, but I rather hope not; I prefer to imagine that later, either after I left that night or one shortly after, he found a quiet moment to himself and put his own full-stop at the end of that sentence. 

A while later I checked in to see how things were going. He and his sister Cara were doing the "you take it"/"no you take it" thing with Cameron's possessions, and neither of them had need or room for his Rather Nice Bose Sound System. I, an audio-snob, made a joke about giving it a good home, and he, knowing that both these things were true, said "Done." In a later call he mentioned that they couldn't find it, and I promptly forgot all about it. 

Last week, having spent my first Friday in town with my Penpal, I pinged my once-Air Force Cadet-now-Wing Commander friend to see if he was free to join me for my second, and when he arrived he'd brought it with him; it had been boxed up in some out-of-the-way place, and he'd put it aside. I was touched, and a little ashamed - I recently upgraded my stereo and wondered if I'd be able to show it the love he deserved, but I accepted it with gratitude, and we sat out on the balcony as the sun set catching up on the last 8 months' worth of stories, and some from much much longer ago (when you've known someone for a lifetime-and-a-half there are plenty of them to remind each other of). 

Last night I set the Bose up in my bedroom; there weren't enough power points in any convenient part of the living room. Cabling it together, re-tuning it for the room, and with the only source I had cables to connect to it being my laptop, positioned it alongside, cued up Wish You Were Here so the album cover was visible on the screen, hit play, and settled on my bed to listen to it, snapping a photo on my phone which I sent to Smeghead without caption or comment: 

This morning he replied with a Thumbs Up emoji, which was all that really needed be said. 

Ricky...

I burned out a little on writing last week bashing out a three and a half thousand word novel of a thing, and I'm not even sure I have it in me now, but I've two pieces in the brain-pipe (not counting the two I left as enigmatic context-free subject-lines in my Drafts the other evening) that I want out of my head and the other one's a blog-post so doing this first. 

I mentioned Ricky in the email which resulted in my getting all messy and weepy ("Combing the mess of tangled threads..." Sun, 12 Feb 2023 02:05), I also cc'd her on my Bitchkrieg-level smackdown of a now-ex colleague ("Someone set up us the bomb..." Fri, 12 Aug 2022, 19:54), but she's most noteworthy in ("Re: Old thread was needy and whiny; new context- and content-free thread..." Mon, 24 Oct 2022: 23:42) in a sentence which could have been the beginning of its own narrative, but wasn't, because apparently I'm a lit-tease. 

So if Ricky and a smoochy black kitten were the catalyst for tears which two years couldn't coax out of me I suppose she's worth some exposition. 

You know those stories of star-crossed people drawn to each other over time and space, destiny-entwined but out-of phase? Never both single at the same time, or opportunities missed, connections lost, important letters undelivered, so-close-but-yet-so-far on-the-wrong-side-of-the-sliding-doors, deeply-yearning-over-distance, every parting a loss, every moment apart an itch you can't scratch, unrequited-but-not-undesired? 

Well that ain't us. 

Just getting that out of the way. 

When I said "I scored her in the breakup with Emma" ("Re: Old thread was needy and whiny; new context- and content-free thread..." Mon, 24 Oct 2022: 23:42) I was being absolutely and literally honest; Ricky was in the same belly-dance group and we'd hang out smoking shisha after their performances. I don't 100% remember why I looked her up afterwards, but it turned out to be at about the same time she ditched her husband, and been fucked over by her best friend, so some replacement/transference turned out to be handy. She was also having surgery on her hip joint, and of everyone who said they'd come visit I was one of two who did (the other being her brother who literally lived next door, so he barely counts). I swore to spend the next year single, and she the next year sober, so for most of 2012 she was my designated driver through some fairly problematic drinking (I shouted *all* of her drinks when we were out. A couple of diet cokes or lime sodas is way cheaper than taxis, and taxi drivers don't give you a hug and tell you it'll be OK at the end of the night, although you're welcome to tell me otherwise on the condition that the story follows immediately after that sentence), collaborated on some hilarious schemes, mortified the son of an ex-WA Attorney General by being pulled over doing loop-de-loops of a roundabout ferrying us home after a night on the town, demonstrated that you can absolutely straddle and dry-hump someone entirely platonically (she was helping test-drive couches. It was for science), and shagged her way through a good few of my friends. 

We've exhausted a couple of long-running jokes: 

• Every variation of "no fucks to give" we can come up with. 
• So many versions and remixes of the Buffalo Bill/Jay & Silent Bob "Would you <blank> me? I'd <blank> me..." meme, and the song which plays in the background (Goodbye Horses by Q Lazarus is what I'd Rickroll her wedding with... no, I lie, I'd learn how to use mixing software just so i could mash it up with Rick Astley and we all know it, but the thought is there). 
• "Life is short, so tell your friends you love them, but it's also confusing and terrifying so scream it at them in German."

And no, we never dated, because we've never really been particularly interested in each other that way. We do go out on what I call Date-Not-A-Date's (DNAD) where we book each other ahead, wear something a little nice, go somewhere for dinner-and-an-activity (walk along the river, or sit in a park, or eat ice cream in the front seat of the car whilst the rain beats on the moon-roof)... all the semiotic cues which slipstream your brain into particular thought processes like: 
"Y'know, I really like this person. I'm having a really nice time, I hope they are too." 

But never: 

"Will they/we or won't they/we?"

Because at the end of the night we drop the other off and go home. For all that we lose that frisson of excitement, we also skip the anxiety and disappointment because at the end of the night we've already got everything out of it we could want. 

You can probably guess that the DNAD concept was one of mine; the mildly-transgressive reappropriation of a social convention as part of an inwardly-focused mind-game designed for cognitive re-de-reprogramming is covered in my fingerprints. I've been maintaining that I'll not even consider looking until the hole in my life isn't Kat-shaped, and she's been focused on looking after her elderly dad, working full-time, and getting thru her B. Commerce (Business/Management). We neither have time or patience for having "Getting To Know You Dance" after "Getting To Know You Dance", but after nearly decade of serial-monogamy I couldn't remember even what it felt like. It wasn't just a practice-session, it was a reminder of why I should care in the first place. For her it scratches an itch, helps me remain within a Standard Deviation of being a Real Boy(TM), and if anything else gets itchy she still has Bumble. 

There's an enduring love there which one might suggest is in the truest ideals of polyamory, in that it's non-exclusive, and by no means trivial. It's not that we're star-crossed, we're just stars who've fallen into a stable orbit. We didn't miss opportunities, we chose not to pull the trigger. The connection is there, and if one of us misses the train the other will be waiting at the next station. Distances are just geography, every parting is a promise, and absence is conquerable with a phone call. 

So there you have everything, and nothing about Ricky (or Tricky Ricky Nicky, or Richelle N***** A******), but that's also what we are to each other, so it's everything you need to know even if it's nothing you actually wanted to ask. 

Epilogue: