I had planned to write an exuberant, funny little post about how, an hour after I wrote my last post, my Friday took a definite upturn, but I'm feeling suddenly sort of melancholy. But I'll tell you about the rest of Friday first.
At roughly 2pm, after I'd logged off the internet, my boss called me to ask if I wanted to come pick up my bonus check.
Say what?
BONUS. CHECK. Totally unexpected.
It was over $650.
So okay, I wasn't tired anymore and was jumping around and squealing like a demented squirrel who has suddenly found a whole year's worth of stored acorns in the middle of winter. I got my check, delivered the down payment for my pending fairy tattoo, and went shopping. I picked up a few items from the electronics section that were filed in the "could definitely use but can grudgingly live without" category. Yay. Then I got home and messed with my new toys for a bit...and then at about 6:30pm, I got a call from a number I though might be from Beaver Dam. Hooly shit.
I got the part of Rosalind in Moon Over Buffalo.
::falls over::
Now, I can't really picture how it's gonna go over with an audience to see a fat chick in a love triangle complete with passionate kissing, but okay. I'll do the job and I'll love it. I'll just have to forget that I never would have in a million years placed a girl my size in that role...and just do it. Just be Rosalind. I have to believe it before anyone else does, right?
All in all, I was ecstatic to get the part. I'm pretty sure it's the biggest part I've ever had.
But anyway...
Last Thursday night I logged onto Yahoo to find that my old friend Marty, a man from the Philippines I used to chat with and write to constantly when I was a senior in college, had sent me a message inviting me to sing with him on SingSnap. I went to his page and listened to him sing...and wow...he sounded kind of like George Harrison. Same sort of voice, anyway...and not what I would have expected. Not that I would have known what to expect. I loved the sound of it, though. So I joined and since then we've been exchanging little messages over the site...and I'm starting to feel like I felt back when we felt spiritually inseparable. It sucks. It sucks because he's married now and it sucks because he's in Riyadh until God knows when, and it sucks that nobody has ever written to me the way he does. We had an intellectual and emotional relationship based on a foundation of poetry. We met because of poetry, we connected because of poetry, we sent our favorites to each other and wrote new ones about the way we felt. His poetry was magnificent. Sometimes I'll come across an old printout and sigh. Such words. I miss them.
Right now Marty's family is far away from him, back in Manila, and he's got to be so lonely. I'm lonely, too. Is it wrong of me to hope that he and I can rekindle the romance of words that we once shared? We'll never meet...
Yeah, yeah. It's wrong.
But I think its says something that...well, let me back up. We had a sort of signature poem. Some couples have songs, right? We had a poem, "somewhere i've never traveled,gladly beyond" by e.e. cummings, easily one of my very favorite poets. This poem was our theme song, and it will always remind me of him. It will always feel special. A few years ago, while talking on the phone with my beau of the moment, this beau wanted to read me a poem...and chose that one. Immediately it felt like fate had slapped me in the face and pointed at the man on the phone, saying THIS IS THE ONE. He wasn't, of course.
But maybe, at one point in time, even half a world away, Marty was.
