Dear nameless famous person,

This may surprise you to hear, but I waited all day yesterday for your phone call.

I camped out by the phone, fearful to go to the bathroom or take my lunch, constantly living in terror of the blinking voice mail light on my phone. To see that light turn on would mean that you had called and I was not here. Missing your call would be the worst horror I could imagine right now. (Try me later. I'm sure worse ones will occur to me.)

I wonder if you have any idea what that's like. Perhaps you've auditioned for a part and then had to wait for a phone call to find out if you've gotten it. But if you miss that call, your livelihood isn't really affected. You just audition for another part or call the guy back or go out and get a real job like the rest of us stiffs.

If I miss your call, then I will have upset your carefully balanced celebrity innards. You may potentially swear off speaking to us ever again, your fragile schedule shattered by my unstoppable urge to leave my desk for a moment and urinate. Your "people" will respond to this tantrum and call me with nasty words of admonishment--as in, how dare you have an existence that does not revolve around speaking to famous people for your rag of a magazine?

"My client's very upset!" they'll shout. "Where did you go? We said we would call today! He has other things to do besides speak to reporters! He has a very busy schedule and he has to get ready for his next scene and he should be spared worrying about meeting the demands of some low-life journalist!"

You're right. I am a "low-life journalist." I am a meaningless whisper of a soul who honestly does have nothing better to do than to wait by the phone and hope that a famous person will call. In fact, that's what I get paid to do. In some ways, my livelihood is directly dependant upon how many famous people I can talk to, how many interesting things I can get them to say, and how fast I can turn those words into an article that will pay proper homage to the neverending glory that is celebrity.

When I know you or one of your species will call, I wring my stomach into thirty thousand knots while I wait, desperately afraid that I'll say the wrong thing, ask the wrong question, not live up to my manufactured image of myself. When a famous person finally calls, I clutch up for a moment and then struggle to be as interesting and funny as I know I am not, for just the next fifteen minutes of my life. After that fifteen minutes, all that personality drains out of me and forms a tiny puddle beneath my chair. I become normal again. I have touched the life of a star for a moment, and now that moment is over.

For you, it must be very different. Living in the rarefied stratosphere of celebrity, there may never be a dull moment. Instead of serving others, others serve you. Instead of depending on others, others depend on you. You are central; vital. You are meaning. When you decide that your pretty little photogenic head hurts a little and you don't want to "work" for a day, the entire production of whatever you are blessing with your time simply grinds to a halt. For nearly one hundred other people, time literally stops. Their jobs are put on hold; they have nothing to do. They're useless until you feel better and return to your project to give their lives a purpose again.

Is that tough for you, resting at the center of a universe? It doesn't matter how small the universe is; it's still a universe. You still have someone whose job it is to find you jobs, and someone else whose job it is to schedule when you can talk to other people, and maybe even someone else to take care of your every other life responsibility and necessity. Laundry, cooking, cleaning, even romance are all taken care of. All you have to focus on is...

...well, that's an interesting point, isn't it? What does your life mean, really? When everything sucks for me--such as now, for example, when the spot where my heart used to be is full of echoes and vultures--I know that at least I have the mundanities of life to rely on. I have dinner to make every night, television to watch on occasion and work to attend to. I have to keep my car full of gas and my belly full of food. When you're famous, what do you have other than your fame, your friends and your money?

I'd kill for those things (okay, maybe not KILL per se, but definitely wound or hurt real bad), and yet I'm also happy with what I have. I'm mundane, normal, boring--and in a sense, that's fine. At least I have my boredom. At least you have your fame.

Yesterday evening, I waited for your call for as long as I could and then I left because I had a wake to attend. The wake was for an acquaintance who had committed suicide. He was twenty years old and he killed himself--why, we'll never know.

Oddly enough, I thought about you at that wake. I thought about the thin thread that connects this life ended far too soon to your own. I wondered how you would react if you ever heard about his death. You didn't know him, but you would have to understand how he must have felt, in some small way. We've all felt that way sometimes, that our lives are meaningless and that we could vanish from Earth and no one would care. But that's not true of anybody, and we both realized it. Maybe he didn't, and that's why he's not here and we are.

His life really means nothing to you. His death means even less. You just sit in your sealed atmosphere and bustle around, too busy to make a phone call. That's pathetic, but what's even more pathetic is that I have to wait for you all day and waste my life knowing that you can't even be considerate enough to make that phone call. After last night, your celebrity and my worthless devotion to it suddenly seem a lot less important.

So call, or don't. I may be at the phone, or I won't. At the very least, we'll both be alive. Maybe we'll even be happy. Senseless death can give even the most meaningless of lives that much more meaning, because it's a life, and it's always precious. Whether we ever do our goofy little interview and I get to write my goofy little article or not, I sincerely hope you understand at least this much.

Love,
Matt