Amber’s Somebody Story
i got my very first alert from someone asking me to deliver a message to marco yesterday. i was in my car about to drive out to an afternoon with my friend visiting from out of town, but i looked at the map and saw that where marco was was exactly on the way where we would be driving. i got really excited like i suddenly had a special mission, some more urgency to my life. it feels more exciting doing a task for someone else than doing it for yourself, the stakes were higher. it also felt a little like a treasure hunt finding him - was the maps part of the app accurate? would he really look like his photo? what sort of person would he be? how many people would i have to interrupt before i found him? is that him? wait, no, is that him?
i parked the car in the parking lot of oinksters restaurant. my friend refused to get out of the car with me, she’s german and i don’t think i adequately explained how the app worked to her. there is also a huge part of my humor that she just doesn’t get. i couldn’t persuade her. i felt a little like an immature teen doing something uncultured, she’d much rather me take her to the hammer museum, but here we were at oinksters with me telling her i had to go give a message to a stranger.
i felt embarrassed standing in the middle of the outside tables looking at everyone, thinking they could see my nervous heartbeat. i found him in two seconds. “are you marco?” he’s sitting with a nice looking friend. it’s raining. “yes.” “great, then can i sit under your umbrella with you?” i didn’t want to get too wet. i sat and told him i had a message for him. i forgot to even mention anything about the app, i just assumed he had known i was coming? i couldn’t remember at that point how it all worked. the message his friend had written was sweet. private but not too private. she was asking him if they could be friends again, it seemed there had been some breach. she also had said that he was her only contact on the app so far and so she decided it was fate telling her to reach out to him to mend their friendship. i can’t be sure but i think the message was touching to marco, i think it meant something real for him. at the end the message sender asked me to hug him, so i did.
it was still raining and now i was standing. suddenly i felt like i was encroaching on his emotional space. like i should quickly go so he could process whatever emotion was released from the message with his real friend who was sitting with him. that or maybe the message sender had cheated on marco with this friend sitting here and marco was totally embarrassed to show him that he still had any feelings for this cretin message sender. either way, it was raining and i had a german friend waiting in the car. i took a photo of us but i’ve never looked uglier so i’m not attaching it here.
xo Amber
