- 12th Annual Young Alumni Essay Contest
- Schaal Prize: “Liminality," Katie Laurence ’21
- Honorable Mention: “I Swallowed the Moon," Kathryn O’Callaghan ’17
Some weddings are better than others, but every wedding will remind you of how loved you are or how single you are. Over the ten years since graduation, I went from a friend group where we were all dating around, sharing the woes of romance, to all of us finding the one and locking them down.
Well, except for me, despite my best attempts.
The people I once knew as individuals I could now only speak of as a pair. There was:
James, who went from our graduation ceremony to his wedding ceremony with Marcie, who he had been with since seventh grade, and
Noor, who last year married Daniel, who also went to Notre Dame but whom she only met when they ended up at the same med school and were coincidentally in the same two disconnected study groups, and
Khoa, who got married three years ago to Pauline, whom he met at a work conference for accountants, and, of course,
Mercedes, not married but might as well be, having been with her partner Alex for the past five years, and whose elopement I expected to find out about through a letter in the mail sometime in the near future, despite how much she talked about having a big wedding.
I was semi-dedicated to finding love at this wedding, where there would be a good mix of old friends and new faces. In particular, I was interested in Will, a friend of the bride’s who had so thoroughly integrated himself into our friend group that he often had to remind us that he was not part of whatever diabolical college story we were sharing.
Will, who had told me when I first met him three years ago that he was perpetually single through no fault of his own; Will, who, when I approached him at the pre-wedding welcome drinks, told me he was recently engaged to a girl whom he had, apparently, been secretly in love with since they met three years ago. It was the first thing he said to me when I saw him, as if God Himself compelled Will to cut down any hope I had of finding love. I sipped on my gin and tonic and smiled, listening to him wax poetic about his fiancée, my soul drifting out of my body to watch everything happening to me.
It seemed to me that people were meeting the loves of their lives everywhere — at grocery stores, at bars in Japan on vacation, through a mutual friend of a mutual friend or a roommate’s sister who stopped by to visit and then never left and now had no reason to. I haunted the same places or similar places or did things just as innocuously, like replied to someone’s Instagram story, and all I had to show for it was eye contact with a hot, shirtless man running past me in the city marathon. Noor told me it was because I was so singularly focused on certain aspects of my life that I could never notice when a man was even slightly interested; Mercedes told me it was because I was too focused on finding love, and that it would come to me as soon as I stopped looking.
Now, here I was at another wedding, alone, watching someone I had at one point in time considered one of my best and closest friends, but who now was a person whose story I hadn’t been actively or consistently part of for the past ten years. I barely recognized them, felt like such a tangential connection to them that tears welled in my eyes before anyone even came down the aisle. Listening to the vows was like reading a recap of a beloved show where I’d somehow missed entire seasons. I peeked to my left and right, waiting to see if anyone else was as surprised by the plot developments as I was, only to find people smiling and nodding as if they were present not just for the season but for the filming of the series.
Did any of my friends remember what it was like when we would sit across from each other in the student union and commiserate about wanting to be loved by someone, to be chosen by someone, without realizing that we had already been that to each other for years? It was now that I was coming to the harsh realization that I could no longer be that person for any of them, not because I didn’t want to be, but because I had been edged out. Slowly, quietly, significant others outpaced me and outperformed me in every part of my friends’ lives.
I sat back in my seat, feeling my tears fall incessantly. I was glad for the sunglasses I had to wear for the outdoor ceremony, and then glad when I heard other people sniffling, too, so I could at least feign that the tears were out of joy and not because I was wallowing in my own misery, at my own self-imposed feelings of disconnectedness.
I was a woman obsessed — unable to let go of the fact that I knew my friends before any of their significant others did, that we had been friends first, for longer, despite that they were all now coupled up longer than I knew them alone. How could that be true? I had always known them, and now there was a random person in our lives that I had to share them with, a person who didn’t even know how we used to plan stupid dances for our student clubs or slump back to our dorms at 3 AM after studying or after a dorm party or house party or the bars, or how James, Noor, Mercedes and I sat together on a couch at James’s place sharing secrets, not a single one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.
Even if their partner knew about all those things, they didn’t know them. They didn’t know my friends in the same way my uncle told me when I turned 23 that I was still a stranger to the world, though I argued against him and insisted that I knew way more than he was giving me credit for. Now, at 30, I know he was right. I wondered, not for the first time, if maybe I was learning everything too late, that there was a secret to living the life you wanted and I wasn’t catching on to it fast enough.
It felt unfair that I had to share my friends with everyone, but that everyone had someone they got to keep to themselves. I had never felt this way before, never felt as though I was being dropped in the middle of the ocean without a single life raft to cling to. Like I had washed ashore after a shipwreck while everyone else had been saved, and I could only watch the horizon, unable to see the ship that was coming to get me.
I was glad for the dancing when it started. Glad that I could drop the mask on the dancefloor, where people were more preoccupied with keeping their drinks steady than with why someone was still crying despite the fact that the ceremony was over. My friends gathered around me as the DJ played our favorite songs from college mixed with the newer songs of adulthood. Colored lights ricocheted off the ground and my friends’ faces.
Every time the lights moved over them, they looked different. In the purple light, Khoa’s nose looked more petite than usual. When the lights turned green, Mercedes’s ears stuck out too far. In yellow, Noor’s eyebrows were so straight. With red, James’s freckles glittered. They became a kaleidoscope of images, a pastiche of the people I used to know and the people who existed now.
The music changed. It was a dance remix of a song I loved. I first heard this particular remix while I was visiting James and Will one summer, and we listened to it on blast with the windows down while driving down the Pacific Coast Highway. The pull of the song was magnetic. I moved more deeply into the dance floor. I went straight to the middle of our friend group, breaking through the dance circle that formed as the first lyrics began, a kind of celebration of the exact moment that we were experiencing now, under the moonlight in the desert.
The bride and groom found their way to me. Leaning over: “This is your favorite song!”
It was. I threw my head back with a laugh, tears filling the edges of my eyes again. Our group swelled onto the dance floor — my friends from college and their partners and me.
Trini Bui’s essay was one of two honorary mentions of this magazine’s 13th annual Young Alumni Essay Contest. Trini currently teaches high school English in Fort Worth, TX, and was selected as a 2025 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow.