Twenty years in, wedding gown yellowing in my mothers’ closet, white bouquet dried out and hairsprayed to keep it from crumbling, satin shoes stained by fresh mown grass, I can’t remember what the cake tasted like. Raspberries or strawberries, hundreds of hands shaken, my cheeks sore from smiling. Everything’s blurred. Memory, the child of what happened and what I wished had. Only one thing has sharpened with time. The voice of that woman brave enough to rise above the flowers and the music and the waistline that needed taking in every week and say, defeated,
yet another one sacrificed on the altar of perennial love.
Eleonora Balsano is an Italian-born writer based in Brussels. Her short fiction in English has won awards, been listed, or nominated, and appears in Portland Review, JMWW, and elsewhere. She hosts and produces Chosen Tongue, a podcast dedicated to translingual writers and their journeys.
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