Editor’s Note: This blog is brought to you from one of those “left behind” as we prepare for the first ToaD Fantasy sailing. Thank you Todd Carrier!
Where is your breaking point? At what point is it too much?
You want to be happy for your friends. They are wonderful people. They hold a very special place in your heart. They are going on a fabulous cruise vacation–without you. You are unable to attend because you are chained to fiscal responsibilities and a limited number of vacation time available to take.
You’ve watched them plan their voyage for nearly two years. Arrival parties. Group excursions. Private group tastings. Gift exchanges. Private dining events. You’ve sighed as you watch their countdowns tick away. First months. Then weeks. And days. Finally hours. You’re ready to snap. You can’t take it anymore.
You can recount your vacation time and how you spent it that year. Mostly with these same friends. Sometimes without any of them. Taunting them nearly as much as they are taunting you. The proverb, “what goes around, comes around” really does ring true. You can ask your friends to have fun for you and post lots of Facebook photos and updates. But you are still stuck in the grey dreary everyday in October while they are over a thousand miles away, basking in the surf and sun.
You can remove yourself from the email and Facebook subscriptions, but you derive an obscure sense of pleasure from knowing, from seeing, from being kept on the outside of the looking glass. You’ve peeped for this long, it feels just as wrong to stop watching as it does to continue.
You could also take advantage of your annual pass and some killer air line deals and credits and fly across the country–putting yourself a thousand miles from them. Enjoying something wonderful…but you’d still be stuck thinking about them. And how much this friend would adore that attraction and that friend would loath that restaurant or how much fun it would be to walk arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder down the other Main Street with them.
I guess it is either grin and bare it or find new friends. Since I’m sort of partial to most of them, I think I will just take it on the chin. After all, it’ll be a memory far too soon for any of them.
Awesome. I loved every sentence.
So are they going on a cruise, or is this the rapture?
Toddles, I feel the same way on every trip all my friends take! I can only take sidelong glances at the planning and festivities, lest the agony of being “Left Behind” become too sharp. But still I watch, and subscribe, and try to enjoy it all vicariously, knowing that someday, SOMEDAY I’ll be able to join them again!