Life After Darkness by Michelle Knight

Author:Michelle Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2018-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Marriage and Home

My new beginning with you is a blessing . . .

STARTING WHEN I was about twelve years old or so, I had these big, beautiful daydreams about the wedding I would have one day. Because the dreams were all in my head, it was easy for everything about the event to be perfect. There would be huge bouquets of flowers, the groom would be handsome, I would look gorgeous in my long, white bridal gown, and everything at the reception would just sparkle. All the guests who attended the wedding would be warm, loving friends and family members, and all of us would have a wonderful time and feel happy and glad for days and weeks afterward.

I don’t know how this idea got planted in my brain. I had never been to such a wedding, and I certainly had never seen a happy marriage—not anywhere in my family anyway. But I guess the idea that there could be a good marriage and a beautiful wedding to celebrate it must have just been in the air. And like a lot of little girls of twelve or so, I plucked it out of the air and made it my own fantasy.

Later, during the years I was a captive in Castro’s house, as soon as he let me have a piece of pencil and some paper, I even designed the wedding dress for that perfect wedding: white, of course, strapless, floor length, and with long sleeves that I thought added a real touch of elegance. I was no longer a little girl by that time, but my little-girl dream was still in my head, and I drew the dress in great detail, over and over: the perfectly beautiful dress I would wear as a bride at my perfectly beautiful wedding. When you’re confined and have nothing to do with your time except wait to be abused, imagining the details of a wedding that will never happen is a good way to pass the time. It’s a survival strategy: Focus on the impossible. Imagine something so far-fetched it can take your mind away from the reality. And you never want to think about the reality because it’s unbearable.

As the years went by, I was able to get hold of papers or magazines so I could also clip out different news stories or photos that depicted what I wanted such a wedding to look like. I could add and subtract, change and edit all the details of this fantasy: These are the flowers I would like. . . . This is the tablecloth. . . . These are the dresses I want my bridesmaids to wear. . . . This is what I want the church to look like. It all got grander and grander, further and further away from the reality of life in that house.

And then it became real, and I was actually planning my own wedding with Miguel. By then, of course, my ideas had changed somewhat.

I don’t have

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.