I had a lot of time to think on the bus ride back into the city from Boston on Labor Day. Honestly there’s not much else to do when you don’t have computer and are running on about two hours of sleep and therefore simply don’t have the strength to focus on the book you brought along. After a long wedding weekend of watching another high school friend get married, I wondered why it was that I didn’t feel like either of us were really old enough to be doing a thing as grown up as get married.
When you’re 18 and in high school and look at people who are 26, you think hell, they’re so old, they should be married and buying houses and thinking of having children. You think that by the time you’re 26 you’ll have everything a lot more figure out. Or at least, I did. But times flies (woosh!) when you’re not paying attention and those years in between just disappear and there you are suddenly sitting in a banquet room of a hotel in the city you went to college in (wasn’t that just yesterday, too?) watching this person you’ve known since the ninth grade make a promise to God and the world and everyone in the room that they will never leave the person standing in front of them for the entire duration of their lives.
Oh. I can’t make a commitment as to where I’m going to get lunch.
So that’s when, speeding at eighty miles per hour towards the real world that awaited me, I started to feel the early onset of The Fear. Not only can barely I afford the rent on my (albeit overpriced) studio apartment let alone a wedding, I was also the only one of my high school friends at this wedding not either already married or in a committed relationship. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course. But, as alone-happy as I readily claim to be, even the most rigid of single people can’t help but wonder if there’s something maybe really wrong with them at a wedding surrounded by happy couples. Do I need to get a part time job? Leave New York and start saving money for my future? Sign up for online dating?!
The Fear was rising up quickly in my throat as I began to wonder if perhaps all the choices I’m making in an attempt to figure out what I want are what are ultimately leaving me to feel like I’ve yet to really grow up. Do you take Manhattan to be your home, for richer or for poorer, in rent hikes and transit strikes, in job loss and salary cuts, with perpetual un-dateable men for as long as you both shall live?
My thoughts were interrupted as I watched the woman sitting in front of me stand up abruptly and walk to the front of the bus and try to get the attention of the bus driver. I wondered what she was gesturing wildly about, and thought for a split second that maybe she’d been thinking some things over this entire bus ride too, and unlike me had come to some major revelations as to how she was going to live the rest of her life and wanted to immediately exit the bus and begin again. Let me out! I thought she might say. I know what I want! I’ve figured out what I’ve been doing wrong!
Instead, I sat unmoving as the man in the front seat saw what I couldn’t, and with lightening speed he procured a black plastic shopping bag to the woman just in time for her to violently throw up.
Okay, so maybe I was wrong. But I took comfort that perhaps it was The Fear rising in her throat too, and I’m not the only one who doesn’t have it all figured out just yet. We have more time, I wanted to tell her, but instead closed my eyes just as the Manhattan skyline came into view. What’s another eight years anyway?
2 comments:
Last weekend I too had the pleasure of being the only single friend from high school at yet another friend's wedding (even better, I was a bridesmaid)There's nothing like a party celebrating binding manogomy to throw you into a panic...
It can be painful at times, I know. Tho look at the bright side Ash, at least we're only being thrown into a panic, and not actually throwing up.
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