Pity Party

You know in movies, when there's a character who's friends with the protagonist, and the protagonist does something awesome, like make the winning shot in a basketball game at the buzzer against a team of Nazis or something, and the crowd goes crazy, and everyone's jumping up and down and cheering, and the character is jumping up and down and cheering right along with everyone, and then the protagonist is carried off the court on the shoulders of the crowd, carried off somewhere the character can't follow, and the camera shot just shows the character left behind, in the empty gym, with the excitement and adrenaline seeping out of his or her system and the sadness setting in, the sadness that their friend is moving on and they are left still standing there in the gym?

Or the story where there's this group who are all waiting to hear their name called, for an election or acceptance into a program or getting picked for a team or whatever, and one by one their names are called, and everyone is crazy happy for the person whose name was called, but how it gets harder and harder for the ones who are left behind, the ones who aren't hearing their names, the ones who have to face everyone's else's name with excitement and joy and congratulations because they deserve it but it gets harder and harder to embrace everyone else's good fortune when it becomes more and more glaring with each name called that it's not your name, that you weren't chosen?

It's in the quietness after the joy that the sadness seeps in. The fall after the high.

And yes, there will always be another game where you have the shot at being the hero, the one carried off on everyone's shoulders, another election or acceptance or whatever where your name, eventually, will be called. And I, right now, at this moment, am a horrible person for not focusing just on the highs of my friends who did win the game, whose names did get called.

But that's what gives characters depth, right? Seeing that they're human.