I have a friend who's getting married.
We were best friends in seventh and eighth grade. We did everything together and hung out all the time. I went to her bat mitzvah. We won an engineering competition together. In the middle of eighth grade I moved from NC to OH. We still called each other and talked on AIM every day. Until high school. She just sort of stopped talking to me, and my parents said it was probably because she was going to an ultra religious high school and there was peer pressure not to talk to people outside her religion anymore.
I still kept tabs on her through social media in college, and sent a condolence card when her brother died because I was too far away to go to the funeral. She was really busy with med school, and I was busy doing advertising in NYC, and I also wasn't sure she still liked me.
Anyway, half our lives later, I'm moving back to NC where she still lives. My dad and I got to meet up with her on one of the house-fixing trips and she ended up inviting us to her wedding. I was shocked. Mostly because I hadn't seen her in thirteen years and here she was inviting me to one of the biggest events in her life. My dad was equally surprised.
I just got the invite in the mail, and it's only addressed to me with an unspecified number of guests. My family wants go (they adore her), so they had me ask her how many of us were invited. I really didn't want to go alone to a wedding where the only people I know are the bride, her parents, and the maid of honor who will be waaaay too busy to talk to me. But I feel guilty for asking her to waste four spots on people she hasn't seen in thirteen years and who haven't been part of her life. My parents asked me to, so I did, but I still feel stupidly anxious about it.
I'm not sure if I did a social faux pas or not, or what I should do going forward. At the moment she says she's not sure how much space she's got. But I really don't want her to waste spots. I know weddings aren't cheap. And she's way too nice to tell us off. Would it be better to just say I can't go and send a gift instead? I don't want to hurt her feelings but I also don't want to be a burden.