It became a favorite pastime of ours to watch the show together. I, being on the East Coast at the time, made the sacrifice of waiting three hours just so we could watch simultaneously via AOL Instant Messenger.
She had been battling The Big C for quite some time, and I knew it. But there was a strength in her 4'11" frame that made her seem almost invulnerable. Needless to say, the stone that sank into the pit of my stomach the day her husband sent that dreaded Facebook message has weighed me down for almost 365 days.
Last summer, I got my first tattoo - a little blue bat on the inside of my left wrist. It doesn't mean much, except that blue is my favorite color and I've loved bats since I was four. When I learned of my friend's passing, I immediately began to come up with ways in which I could immortalize who she was and what she meant to me. That's when I sketched up this:
The bat is already there, but I drew him again for reference. My plan is to have multi-colored rain falling from the cloud, like paint. The college we attended together was the Art Institute and with both of us being artists, a rain of paint seemed appropriate. The text is "roll the hard six," a line regularly quoted by Admiral Adama (Edward James Olmos) on Battlestar Galactica. [The weird half circle things were also a placeholder and have since been replaced by a dinosaur and a robot because dinosaurs and robots are awesome.] The phrase actually originated in gambling for a high risk, but high reward situation.
It all boils down to something that I learned from her, which is that you never get what you want in life by always playing it safe. Living on the edge with a splash of spontaneity gets you a lot farther than just playing it safe.
I hope to get the piece finished by the end of October. Pictures of the completed piece will likely be posted then.
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