Life do be silly sometimes in the way it shakes out. Completely new characters enter your everyday life, while post-college life and all its changes slowly distance you from other characters who really shaped who you became.
So, to all my newfound, present-day characters, I’m gonna tell you about an old friend who is a major reason y’all get to soak up the absolute pleasure of me standing here today: meet Sunny.
I recently learned she quit her job to live the life of a full-time sailor with her new husband, Michael. (Hi, Michael! I’m Marty, but Sunny calls me Martha. So glad she found you cuz her taste in men in college left me worried!).
Sunny was, and will indirectly always be, a main character from my time at Yale. We were in the same residential college, so we lived in the same castle. She was a couple years older and many years more mature. We got close playing on the club basketball team.
She had me during the questionable era of my life, pictured below. Prepare for a jump scare:
I dug up a Facebook post from 2012 where she tells me not to “complain cause I’m not around at your beck and call.” And honestly, that line sums up pretty well what having her around was like:
(Michael, dunno if you’re Italian but plz give her a strip tease out @ sea so she can be reminded of all the bullets she dodged back in the day).
I joke these days about how assigning an emergency contact is kinda funny, especially when your parents aren’t really an option and you enter singledom for what feels like the first time ever. If Sunny weren’t so far away and currently lost somewhere in the middle of some deep blue random sea, I’d probably still unsolicitedly list her as mine.
Sunny has always lived up to her namesake.
She’s quite literally the only person I know from Delaware, and I think she’s unfairly skewed my overall impression of the state. I’ve probably been giving Delaware more credit than it deserves for years because I imagine she’s actually an anomaly.
Sunny is also one of the smartest people I’ve ever walked alongside. She’s a scientific researcher by trade and someone I’m genuinely surprised has yet to become a contestant on, and subsequently win, Survivor.
She was a freshman counselor her senior year, or a FroCo, as we called them. Naturally, I assigned her as my unofficial FroCo, even gifting her a framed, formal certificate that left her with the lawful duties and responsibilities of the role for life.
I could probably write a pretty entertaining book about the couple years we overlapped in college: the studious all-nighters, the drunken nights, the make-outs with men (I know, plot twist for one of us), hooping, breaking into buildings we probably weren’t supposed to be in, etc.
But the best part of Sunny has always been that she made it really easy to feel cared for. Which made her a no-brainer selection for my unsolicited FroCo. And I imagine the freshmen who were actually assigned to her left college smarter and more prepared for the real world than they otherwise would’ve been.
After my mentyB following junior year, I relied on Sunny for frequent FaceTimes. I’ll forever feel indebted to having her around “at my beck and call” when I needed it most.
Sunny went like seven full years without an Instagram post. And recently, when she finally resurfaced, she hard-launched a husband, quitting her job, and becoming what I imagine is ultimately an aspiring full time mermaid.
For most people, such an update would warrant a: WTF R U WELL?! But with Sunny, it’s absolutely unsurprising.
In her second blog post from out at sea, she casually drops that their engine gave out. Then it sounds like she and Michael pulled off some Amazing Race-style stunt and, with the help of an Uber driver, bartered their way into a spare.
Again: unsurprising.
Sunny has always been the kind of person who finds a solution when things go south, probably with a level of calm that simply was not ingrained in the rest of us when something presents itself as a crisis.
Anyway, TL;DR: I miss Sunny.
To reiterate, life really do be silly. Someone can once be the person constantly at your beck and call, and then one day you blink, and they’re married, somewhere in the middle of an ocean, living the best life you never doubted they’d find or deserved to have.
And meanwhile, there are all these new characters in my life who never got to know the people who helped make me the version of myself they know now. Sunny is one of those people.
So I really hope my new besties get to cross paths with my old bestie one of these days.
Sunny, I’m all caught up on your s’updates. (Sail updates? / ‘Sup-dates?). Keep ’em coming. And lmk when you’re back on land (if ever?), so we can reunite. Thxoxo 💌🕊️
Hawaiian Princess Pieces 