I was a bride once.

The chapel smelled of roses, heavy and sweet, clinging to my skin like memory. My hands, slick in white gloves, trembled; my feet quivered with every step. My mother’s eyes glistened with unshed tears that mirrored my own.

Nerves, yes, but a fear I could not yet name.

They called me lucky. Lucky to be married. Lucky to be loved. Lucky to finally belong in someone’s arms.

I remember the exact moment: everyone rising, clapping, smiling, staring at me in awe. The world cheered for a bride stepping into forever, and none of us knew that the forever I was walking toward was already a grave.

Because after the wedding bells, after the first night, after the sparklers, after the champagne toss — I learned that love is not always gentle. It can hide in slammed doors. It can take shelter in whispered threats. It settles in nights that hum with fear.

It can be cruel.

Yes, even when wrapped in vows.
Yes, even when it promised me heaven.

But surely, heaven does not thunder with doors slamming in the dark.
Surely, heaven does not bruise the skin it claims to bless.
Surely, heaven does not teach children that walls can wound more than streets.
Surely, heaven does not hollow a heart so that silence becomes its home.
Surely, heaven does not ask you to dance with shadows just to survive each day.

Surely, heaven would never become a place I wanted to leave — but it did.

But in my land, there was no door to the air beyond this burning garden, no passage out of the heaven that had turned to wildfire. The law chained me to vows that could not cradle me, to a sorrow too heavy to bear, and to hands that promised warmth but ended up burning me to ashes.

They whisper of a way out. They talk about a golden key that opens locked doors, but the price is a mountain too high for hands like mine to scale. It is written for those who dine beneath chandeliers, not for me, who wring my hands in a dirty kitchen, who hush my children against the dark, who fold my prayers into the morning with hope that the new day would be better than the previous.

So I stayed. I smiled. I bent. I swallowed decades whole, like bitter wine, hoping no one would notice the bruises my skin had never imagined it could carry.

But I write to you now, from a time long past, to tell you that you do not have to.

I write because someone must remember: freedom is never a luxury, and peace should never carry a price.

If you are a bride today, remember me.

I may be gone long past as this reaches you, six feet underneath the earth that saw my tears. Remember that some of us stayed. Not because we were loved, but because my land made leaving impossible.

And maybe, someday, our laws will catch up with our realities.

Ever watching,
Bride from 1946