Summer flavored escape 👒👰🏻

The view from the elegant room was perfect. A delightful dream to the young woman peering smilingly at the landscape. A mild summer day unfolds gently, like a page turned by a breeze.

The sun isn't blazing, but rather dispersing in hints of warmth, its golden light dapples through leafy branches, inviting skin to bask without scorching. Temperatures linger around 22°C (72°F), just enough to coax open a few lazy blossoms in the garden, while shade-dwelling herbs quietly stretch toward the light.

🕊️ In the air, there's a softness...no heavy humidity, just the subtle scent of cut grass and lavender. A few cotton clouds drift slowly overhead, giving the sky a storybook quality. Birds sing not frantically, but with a leisurely rhythm, as if they too are savoring the calm.

👒 It’s the kind of day where windows are left ajar and time feels suspended. Some walk slowly along riversides, straw hats tipped back, eyes half-closed in quiet gratitude. Others lounge with a book they’ve reread too many times, comforted by its worn pages and the sound of bees humming nearby.

It's not dramatic, but it’s perfect in its quietness...like nature itself is taking a deep breath.

🕊️

For no apparent reason which she could immediately fathom...Ruby suddenly felt trapped. She turned to look at the the large chocolate cake, standing like a sentinel to a life where she would be tethered. Her future flashed before her eyes in cinematic views of long ago reels. She saw the beautiful sculptured creation as a gigantic heartache instead of her wedding masterpiece.

What am I doing? Thought the young bride-to-be.

"I should be feeling happy, elated...like I can't wait to become one with another human being".

Ruby felt a volcanic panic which started as a slight tingling in her toes, then radiated to her ankles, she actually stumbled a bit. The feeling quickly climbed like vines up to her feet, her knees felt weak. Thighs, hips, pelvic - thousands of butterflies converged on her stomach...they roared like lions to her throat...it burned like hellfire.

Ruby opened her mouth as they hurtled through her throat...and she screamed. Loudly and terrifyingly. The butterflies made their escape as a rumbling noise into the wind. They flew...like caged animals escaping to freedom.

Ruby gathered up the cumbersome, suddenly burdensome elegant wedding dress...

And she ran...🌿 🕊️

Down the hall, past the portrait of her imagined bridesmaids, dressed as the seven Pleiades sisters, adorned in celestial gowns against a starry sky.

She sped past the many presents, her mother...mouth open mid-enquiry, past the guests in perfectly arranged chairs and her dog, Perseus, who barked in question marks...perhaps thinking her gone mad.

👰🏻💨 The lace of her gown trails behind like tendrils of a life she almost lived.

She doesn’t hesitate. The doors have just flung open, and she’s already halfway down the stone steps...heels abandoned, veil tangled in the breeze. Gasps echo behind her: relatives stunned, bouquets dropped, a groom frozen in disbelief. But she isn’t looking back.

👰🏻💨

Each step is powered by a pulse that’s finally her own...fast, alive, free. The path is a blur of summer petals crushed underfoot and shocked faces fading in the periphery. Her hair comes undone as the wind claims its dark strands flying like abandoned promises set free.

🚘 And there it is. Parked just outside the door...a driver waits, one hand poised casually on the wheel, the other reaching out just slightly as if he already knew she’d come.

"Get out, now". She orders. He does not hesitate, not his first escaping bride.

Ruby slides into the leather seat with one breathless glance toward the sky, and the door shuts with the soft finality of a chapter closed.

🚘🚘🚘

Ruby...

I was supposed to be made of lace and promises.

A fragile thread sewn into someone else’s dream.

But the altar felt like a tether,

and the vows...like velvet cuffs.

I ran.

Not from him.

But from the hush of settling.

From the polite surrender in everyone’s smile.

From the mirror that said: “This is enough.”

Now...

the sky cracks open like the myself I forgot I believed in,

and the wind peels off the past, strand by strand.

My lungs remember how to stretch.

My feet remember how to fly

I see you.

In this car that waited like a story I almost missed.

You don’t ask why.

You already know.

You’ve seen the look before:

that final breath before freedom...

wide-eyed, laughing with salty tears

and trembling just enough to prove I’m still real.

The young woman exhales in uncertainty, not knowing what awaits...but she is free to explore what lies beyond the road.