I am sitting in a kitchen in a very luxurious home somewhere in the northeastern United States. At present, I am alone. I am contemplating how my life has turned out so far as opposed to how I thought it would - because the corner I'm sitting in is a corner I used to sit in when I was in junior high school. My best friend, who has been my best friend since we were around 5 years of age, is getting married tomorrow. He and I sat in this his parents' vacation home countless times - having parties they didn't know about (at least, we fondly imagined that they didn't), commiserating over some pointless thing or other, sitting at this very table hung over after said parties, drinking
bloody marys and eating omelets.
He's getting married tomorrow.
He is the last one of our high school crowd, save me, to marry. Disgustingly, our group of friends apparently have very stable marriages; none have fallen apart.
So here I sit, soon-to-be-sole-survivor.
Ha. Survivor.
He's doing fine, mostly because he organized the whole deal and dealing with the details has kept him busy. His family is also doing fine now that his mother has gotten past the overload point and subsided into zen calm.
I think I'll be fine until I have to put on the suit I bought but have never tried on, sometime tomorrow midday before the actual wedding.
Then I'll be uncomfortable as hell. I'm fat; good clothes are always torture for me. The discomfort, added on to my general feeling of something coming to an end and onrushing isolation, will probably push me over the edge.
Then I'll just have to grit my teeth, bear it, and get through the day. Deal with the fact that getting drunk will probably be a bad idea given my mood; cope with the whole thing sober by reminding myself that this in no way has anything to do with me - I'm scenery, intended to be at a couple places at particular times to be Seen and Photographed, and that's all.
Then I can slink away into the night and be a depressed useless bastard by myself in my car where there's nobody to take splash damage from my mood.