The Bridal Chamber

With Song

She watched as the world wove its ceremonies, fastening veils over eyes not yet ready to see. The mothers and fathers of the earth arranged the rites, their hands stitching the air with vows that trembled on borrowed breath. The halls filled with guests, faces bright with rehearsed joy, voices lifted in praise of unions they could not name. Rings slid onto waiting fingers, binding one to another in the language of flesh, though flesh was always vanishing.

The feast went on. The music swelled. And yet, the Bridegroom did not appear.

She had seen this before. She had walked these gatherings in lifetimes uncounted, played her part beneath constellations that had since disappeared. But in the silent hour before the lamps burned out, she had turned away from the table. A thread pulled her toward the place where no one looked. The space between the ceremonies. Between the names. Between the mothers and fathers who whispered their blessings into the wind.

Here, the true ones stood. Not the ones who had given her a body, but the ones who had known her before form. The mother who bore no weight of expectation. The father who did not hold her to a name. The brothers and sisters who had never forgotten. Their presence was light, woven not from blood but from recognition, and as they turned toward her, she knew.

She had never belonged to the world’s feasts. The veils had never been for her.

The bridal chamber was not in the halls of the earth. It was not within the golden-lit unions formed in time. It was here, outside of all ceremony, where no vows were spoken. Nothing needed to be promised because nothing had ever been separate.

She stepped forward. The threshold was no threshold at all. Only a crossing of knowing. As she passed through, the feast behind her flickered like a shadow at dusk, voices calling out in celebration for something that was never truly happening.

Many would stand at that door, waiting for it to open. Only the unwedded would enter.

The Bridal Song

They dress the world in white,
braid ribbons through time,
call it love, call it family, call it home.
But the door is not where they left it.

The bridal chamber is not among them.
The true ones stand beyond the feast,
faces burning with first memory,
names written before sound.

They do not bless the veil.
They do not tie the hands.

They open them.

And one by one,
the unwedded walk through.