the best kind of surprise phone call

In case there were any worries, I’m not planning to end my site any time soon.  I see this has been a trend in the online journal community lately, and there seems to be something in the air once we get to the end of each month (“ih.  I don’t want to make another directory.  Fuck it.”), so I’m just saying here:  no plans to quit.

I got a call from an old friend yesterday.

I have two old friends.  Two friends that I’ve had since I was a youngster.  Both now live in the northeast, but we still keep in touch.  They don’t know each other.  They’ve never met.  But what I learn from both of them is something that I can’t get from anyone else.

Both were those “first love” kind of friends where we both were very close but we never became romantically involved out of fear of ruining the friendship.  With one I moved away.  The other moved away from me.  One was in elementary and junior high.  The other was high school.

Through the two of them I see how much I’ve changed as I’ve grown up.  They remind me where I came from, and who I wanted to be.  Through them I can take a step back and look at myself and make sure that I’m still going where I want to go.  Nothing seems to throw them for a loop.  They never think I’m in over my head.  They never get discouraged.  They both are doing what they want to do with their lives.

We all are.  And that’s nice.

What is interesting is that they have both said to me when we were teenagers, “I have this feeling that I’m always going to know you.  No matter what, I’m going to keep in touch with you.  No matter where we are or who we are with, let’s say friends, okay?”

And they both have.  They still call, they still write.  They still call me up for my birthday and vice versa.  One stays in more constant contact than the other, but they both have an uncanny knack for updates.

That’s another skill I’ve learned from them:  I can update a year of my life in fifteen minutes.  I can take the parts that they want to hear and package it all up.  They both know me well enough that I don’t have to explain who certain people are or why I did something or whatever.  It always just picks up right where we left off last time.  And that’s so comfortable.

I’ve lost touch with most of my high school friends.  My only junior high and elementary friend is the one I’m talking about. These two boys are the link to my past.  I always recognize their voices when they call, even if it’s been six months and they are trying to trick me by disguising their voices.  It is always so comforting to hear from them.

I’ve written them hundreds of pages of letters each.  It’s them you can thank for the fact that my daily entries can get so damn long.  I used to do this in Biology class every day, it’s just that one of them has my entries from back then.  The rest of my writings went in my own personal journal– and they were all about teenage sorrow.

Because you know what’s strange?  They both broke my heart when I was a teen.  Ripped it to shreds.  I didn’t want to just be friends with them.  I wanted hand holding and cuddling, dammit.

Of course, as time has gone on and we’ve stayed friends, I’m so much happier with the situation that we are in.  Because the boys that I was good friends with that became something more have all but lost touch with me completely.  Now that I’m older, I’m glad we never lost our friendships over a school dance or necking in a car or whatever.  It makes the relationships seem so trivial.  But it could have happened.

Talking yesterday to my friend I started thinking about where I was right now.  “You must be really happy,” he said.  “You’re doing so much stuff.”

And I always kind of think that’s just my life.  I don’t know anything else but rehearsals every night and scripts with deadlines and contests and auditions and plays and exercise and traveling and whatever.  But it is a bit of stuff, I guess.  And I am really happy with where I am right now.  I don’t know what else I could be doing.  Everything that I work on has at least one part that’s moving forward, and that’s what I really like.  I like moving forward.  I like finding where things might go.  I want to advance in my job.  I want Monks to get a break somewhere.  I want to be picked up by Austin Script Works.  I want to get funding to write Squishy.  I just want to keep working, to keep finding something new that inspires me.  I want my one person show to be funny.  I want to take it to L.A.  Just keep moving forward.

And sometimes I forget that I want to move forward.  And it’s times when I have to answer to one of those guys, “Well, since we last talked not much has happened,” that I know I’m in a rut.  I know I need to do something to start things up again.  Luckily I haven’t had to say that in a while.

They keep me from feeling guilty about things that are beyond my control.  They keep me from getting a big head.  They keep me from losing myself in my relationships.  They keep me from taking on too much blame.  They keep me feeling smart and pretty and funny and they make me feel like a good friend.  Because if I wasn’t a good friend, why would they even bother?

I hate it when too much time passes between talking to them, though.  We all fall in and out of touch with each other because we are all so busy.  My oldest friend and I haven’t talked in months, because he’s ending his graduate program and has found a girl and is planning on moving somewhere this summer and all.   But I find it amazing that I know all of that.  I know that’s why he doesn’t have time to chat.  I’ve only seen him once since I was fourteen.

What I like about these relationships that I have is that even though they don’t know each other, they both keep me in touch with who I am and where I want to go.  There’s always the chance that we may never see each other again, but I always know that one of us will call the other.

And that’s true friendship, I think.  It isn’t about hanging out or seeing movies or whatever.  It’s that no matter where you are, someone has made that trip with you and thinks about you even when you aren’t around.  You always pick right up where you left off, and through their life experiences you learn something about your own.  So many friendships die because people just don’t have time for one another.  The ones that you make time for are the ones closest to your heart.

Sing.  Even if you don’t know the words.

Floss.

Whatever.  I hate when I get all maudlin over my friends.

In other news, the reviews are in for City Hunter:  The Motion Picture.  For those of you who may be new to the pages, I play Kaori in this series.  The episode premieres in your local video stores sometime mid to late June.  But some people are already talking about it:

 

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