losing my grace

i'm still a bum.
sure, i could easily finagle a job entertaining irate callers at night. i just choose not to.
i applaud call center agents, even though some of them can be irritating.
or maybe i'm just jealous. hehe!

perhaps also that i feel a little more letdown, more than the past few months. you see, i've been dreading december. because this december meant something big: my best friend getting married.

it was a rite of passage that marked adulthood and an apocalyptic ending to happiness. well, to me anyway. i was happy for her, sad for us. it would never be the same. i hugged her, but i didn't cry. i let her go.

and i hated weddings ever since i was conscious to know what a wedding was. it always seemed so staged, so pretentious to me. and i was often one of those in the procession of the entourage. i nervously waited each time for someone to discover my guise and exclaim "faker!"

i often skipped weddings and wedding receptions of friends. i know, that sounds terribly rude. but it was just depressing to find that with every year, your friends become one of those couples who cannot function without their mate by their side.

you've seen those. wives possessively holding on to their man, shooting daggers with their eyes, and teeth bared in a strange grimacing expression of warning and supposed love to the audience. oh, sorry. i meant, to their friends. husbands, once hot guys, drinking beer, reminiscing bachelor days, their bellies as round as a pregnant woman's, leading one to wonder if it is possible for human men to be like male seahorses.

however we try to sugarcoat it, there will always be that line between the marrieds and the unmarrieds. couples end up flocking together, like noah's ark of twittering twosomes. i envy them. i want to twitter too, even though it might be for a few times.

inevitably, i end up being the unmarried person in our circle, subject to so-when-are-you-getting-married style of questions. perhaps they don't get it yet.

and i end up saying "i don't believe in marriages." to a table of married friends. whoops!

i love my married friends, i really do, but i think they've become cult members of the married market. they can't be as free as before, going out for a little bite and a few drinks later. no. they have their husbands and wives and children to think of now.

i brought my lesbian friend to the wedding reception. and for the night, we were supposedly straight to those who didn't know.

the wedding was beautiful, and the reception was even more so. even i, jaded and cynical of such gestures, found it really fabulous and touching and wonderful. so i guess there might be hope for me yet!

i hugged my best friend, her family and relatives, and finally shook the hand of her husband before my date and i left the reception.

in one day, with one rite, with one kiss, i had lost her to him.

so i did what any guy who lost a girl would do: swallowed and guzzled too many drinks at a bar with a lesbian friend, laughing and babbling incoherently as the night drew to a close.

er, well, maybe it's just me.