I spent four hours tonight watching people pretend that joining two lives together is the ULTIMATE achievement of a human existence. It was a wedding in one of those glass-walled venues where the champagne costs more than my first car, and the air was thick with the scent of lilies and expensive perfume. We humans are such strange, hopeful creatures—we gather in these bright rooms to celebrate a beginning, but all I could see was the inevitable thinning out of the self that comes after the party ends. Am I the only one who looks at a dance floor full of sweating, smiling couples and feels like I’m watching a foreign film without the subtitles? I spent forty years being the silent engine of a household. I was the one who made sure the socks were matched and the dinners were hot, and now that I’m retired and the house is still, I realize I’ve become entirely TRANSPARENT.