The Fifth Wheel of Life

I sit here, as I have done many times before. The place may change,
the people evolve, but the feeling is essentialy the same. I'm the
fifth wheel as I always have been. Not unlike the others in any drastic
way, but still totaly redundant as a working part of the whole.

As I sit here, among friends, I wonder, not for the first time how
different it would really be if I had never entered their sphere of
existance. I have to conclude that nothing would be different.

I use my imagination to edit myself out of this picture. It's not
hard.

A few words wouldn't have taken place, a few laughs, in this place i'm
sitting would be...what? One of them maybe...or even a jacket, a few
books or perhaps just vacant.

Vacant space.

How descriptive. How apt.

I am vacant space.

I watch them interact with one another as if from far away. As if this
were a fly on the wall documentary and I a casual viewer.

Who are these people? I know their names of course, just as if I had
watched the opening credits but..... I feel completely superfluous to
their lives.

How the hell did I get here?

If not here, then where would I be, if we had never met? What if I
hadn't dropped out of Uni all those years ago, what if I hadn't just
run a pen across the local paper when I was house hunting and come
across the rent for this place? Would I be a wife with a parcel of kids
now?

What if my mum hadn't died - would I be thinking about this shit?

Is this endless self - questioning a natural part of grief? What is
unnatural grief? Is it wallowing? Am I wallowing? I have that tendancy
I know.

I also have the tendancy to look back, not forward. Most of my pain is
focused on what happened. What I saw. What I did. How I felt.

Maybe that's because when I try and rationalise a future without her my
mind shudders back. Kind of like trying to visualise infinity - an
impossible thing to grasp...it's too MUCH.

And so I sit here. I feel the pain well up inside me again. It's a very
selfish pain I know. I wasn't alwyas like that, at the time I did truly
care more about her than me.

But she's gone now. Her pain is over.

And it seems like mine is only beginning.

They laugh as I sit here watching them. I can't quite feel anything.
I'm here, but not here. I belong, and yet don't belong at all.

I'm the fifth wheel of life.

And it's a mystery to me why I exist at all.