Everybody's doing it
So, I'm doing my daily web search on the usual names, and something new pops up:

Martin Hartle and Natalya Tartakovsky announced their engagement. It's in the Seattle papers. A June wedding is planned.

It's tough to describe what I'm feeling right now. I've plunged myself into being Michelle Garber, living a life I enjoy, and which I assume will just go on. If someone were to confront me and say they could reverse the swap of memories and personality or mind-patterns or whatever, it's something I'd have to think on. What would the (mostly) reconstituted Martin Hartle do? And quite frankly, if I just woke up in Seattle, mind back in that familiar body, I'd be somewhat pissed, both in terms of someone screwing with my life without asking and the things I've come to enjoy about my life.

Or at least, that's what I've thought. As it turns out, I look at that announcement and I think I should be marrying her. Which is more than a little silly, since the odds are pretty good that if my "mind" (for lack of a better word to describe the non-physical aspects of the original Martin that wound up in this person typing this message) had been in that body for the past eight months, I would have likely never gone to the ballet, or whatever the circumstances were where he met her.

And that makes it worse. He's taken my life, or the life I should have been leading, and messed it up. Maybe it's a good thing, and he messed it up in the way that Pollock messed up a piece of canvas, but he's made that life his own. Whereas I feel like I haven't; I've been living the life the original Michelle would have lived. I've been doing her job, living in her apartment, dating a guy I know she would have met. Would she have gone out with Kurt? I'm not sure on that, but even there, I was following someone else's plan.

And I wonder if Martin-2 has taken her to meet mom. Or maybe brought my mother out to meet her family. Have invitations gone out to Kurt, and Wei, and everyone else I would have invited? I can't imagine them inviting me, just out of fear of a "speak now or forever hold your peace" moment.

Gah, I don't know what I feel about this yet. I wish I had someone I could talk to about it. I'm half tempted to call Jen and Carlos and say I won't be coming to the big opening-night party, but aside from how I'm bringing food (hot dogs, in my case), I don't feel like being by myself or with just Carter, either.

-M/M
- posted 6:13 PM - - (archive use only)