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wedding at the last minute because of a wardrobe malfunction.

    When the wedding and honeymoon were over and Michael and I began to settle into our lives, the weight gain only increased. The more I tried to stop it, the more I felt as though I were inquicksand. Just living my everyday life was difficult, carrying around all this extra weight I didn’t know what to do with. It was bad enough I had to go to school and to work heavier than I’d ever been; I certainly didn’t want to let my friends and family back home know that I was spiraling out of control. I started avoiding trips to Durham, too ashamed to see the girlfriends I’d grown up with. Of course I should have confided in them, perhaps they would have even been able to help. I certainly could have used some shoulders to cry on. But my best friends were two of the most beautiful girls you’ve ever seen, and I foolishly thought they wouldn’t be able to understand. How could they identify with my looking worse than I ever had and being unable to do anything about it? Instead of seeing them in person, I kept in touch by phone, never letting on that I was getting fatter by the day.
    That was all well and good until a year after my wedding, when my friend SuLin announced her engagement. Because I hadn’t been home, I had yet to meet her boyfriend, now fiancé, but I was still so very happy for her and readily accepted her invitation to be one of her bridesmaids. Standing up for SuLin in her wedding as an obese woman was never an option for me; I wouldn’t even entertain the notion of walking down an aisle in a gown, well over two hundred pounds. The wedding was several months away, and once again, I stupidly convinced myself that I would be able to look fabulous in a dress by that time. Of course I remembered how my own wedding dress disaster turned out, but I used that as ammunition to try and get myself amped up for this very important weight loss.
I can’t let my best friend down! Time to buckle down and do what has to be done.
    I made an excuse when SuLin tried to get me to come home and meet her intended. I feigned work when she asked me to go with her to pick out our bridesmaids gowns. These were fairly simple deceptions to pull off; we lived far apart, and we were both busy with school and work. But when she called asking for my measurements so that she could order my dress (red! strapless!), I could hide no longer. It had already been a couple of months since SuLin had told me she was getting married, several weeks in which I was supposed to have gotten busy with my weight loss. Had it happened? Of course not! What the hell was I going to do now?
    I should have come clean, right then and there. I could have confided in SuLin about my continued weight gain and my inability to do anything about it; she was my friend. We’d known each other since fifth grade and had seen each other through some pretty tough times. She would have understood, would have helped me through it. She certainly deserved to know the truth as it pertained to her special day, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, couldn’t admit my failure.
I’ll be able to fix it,
I told myself. I came too close to ruining my own wedding, there’s no way I’ll ruin hers!
    I puffed myself up with plans for drastic weight loss, and I gave SuLin
phony
dress measurements. Yes, you read correctly: I completely lied. One of my bridesmaids had been a size 12, and I found her measurements in my wedding planner. I sized them up just a bit to make myself about a size 14. Seriously, at this point I was a size 20 or larger. SuLin’s wedding was a mere four months away—a miracle would have to happen in order to get me in that dress. But I somehow convinced myselfthat telling the truth was way worse than risking letting my best friend down in a huge way; it was easier to try to take it all on my shoulders and make it okay.
    Gaining weight and being unable to stop it was one thing; lying about it