Another Wedding!

I just wrote a long post and then Blogger decided to eat it, and I no longer have the energy or the time to re-write the whole thing.

But the basic gist of it was that my best friend from high school, Melissa, called me on Friday night to tell me that she's getting married in December!

We hadn't talked in a very long time and had managed to lose touch completely over the past two years, so it was good to hear from her again. We didn't lose touch on purpose, it's just weird how that happens when you're someone like me that's notoriously bad at keeping in touch with people. One day it was like we had just talked (she had a long-term boyfriend and they were getting ready to move to Minneapolis, I was getting ready to move here to start grad school), and then suddenly it had been six months, then a year, and then I realized I didn't have a working phone number for her anymore, and then I couldn't find her on MySpace (the easiest way for antisocial people like me to keep in touch), and I realized that I could just call her parents and say, "Where is your daughter?" but that seemed like it would be an awkward conversation and I'm a wuss when it comes to making potentially uncomfortable phone calls, and then I got all paranoid and started thinking things like, "Well, maybe she's mad at me for some reason. I mean, wouldn't she have called me at Christmas if she really wanted to see me?" even though I know that I personally would have enjoyed seeing her but I didn't get brave and make the phone call either, and all of a sudden almost two years had gone by and we hadn't talked at all. But we've always been pretty good at picking up where we left off, and I just assumed we'd get in touch again somehow eventually, probably when something really big happened to one of us.

And sure enough, she called to get my address to send me a wedding invitation. I'm really excited and happy for her, and not too surprised since the last time we spoke she already had a feeling she and Matt would be getting engaged before too long. But if you'd asked me when I was seventeen which person in my close circle of friends I thought would get married first, Melissa would definitely not have been my first choice. In fact, Melissa would have been my very last choice, not because she's unattractive or unappealing or because I think she'd be bad at long term relationships (quite the contrary), but because...well, I think I've told you about the physics teacher that used to try to predict our futures based on what he knew about us, right? Well, he predicted that Melissa would end up running off to the woods and living in a rustic cabin by herself being all philosophical and kind of subversive, and that if she ever got married it would be much later in life to some sort of academic guy twenty years her senior. Because that was Melissa in high school. She had a serious boyfriend, a couple, actually, but she was adamantly not the marrying type. And yet here she is getting married, and she's probably going to beat out both Briar and Kristen (who, for the record, I would have placed my money on in the "Who Will Get Married First?" bet).
Then again, if you'd asked me when I was 17 if I thought I'd be 24 and single and working on my masters degree, I would have laughed at you and said "I'm not that smart, and I'll have a serious boyfriend by then for sure." And if you'd asked my physics teacher what I'd be doing at 24, he'd have said, "Taking out her inner anguish through cake decorating".
Which just goes to show...what? That you can't judge what a person's life is going to be like based on how they behaved in high school? That you can try to predict your own life path as much as you want but you're pretty much always going to be wrong, wrong, wrong?

Or maybe, hopefully, it just goes to show that you often end up happiest taking the path you least expected you would take.

After all, who would have thought Melissa, stomping around campus in an army fatigue jacket, proudly proclaiming that she was never going to get married young or pop out babies or live a typical life, would be living in Milwaukee and working in insurance and planning a wedding at only 24? And who would have thought that I'd happily be doing what I'm doing right now (whatever it is exactly that I'm doing right now)?

Sometimes I love that life is full of surprises and never works out how you think it's going to, and this is one of those times. I'm thrilled for Mel. I don't know where I'll be in December, but I hope for one day at least I'll be in South Bend celebrating with one of the best friends I've had on her wedding day.