Everything started inside a bubble of illusory perfection. My partner and I lived in a luxury apartment at the top of a skyscraper, embedded in an unnamed American metropolis. The atmosphere was one of pure happiness, intensified by the visit of her grandmother.
Why does our psyche bother building castles of absolute comfort, only to take sadistic pleasure in imploding them the very next second?
The answer came through an omnipresent voice, which whispered the order to leave that paradise to the matriarch and move to Orlando. As we descended to the building’s restaurant for a farewell banquet, the illusion crumbled. It took only the ring of my cell phone for the luxury to be swallowed by the void, hurling me into a new and dark transition.
The Blood-Red Carpet and the Cold Labyrinth
I materialized in the back seat of an autonomous car, identical to her mother’s, driving silently without a driver. The final destination of a long convoy of ghostly vehicles was a colossal church. At the entrance, a bright red carpet—shining and thick like freshly spilled blood—guided us not to a sacred altar, but straight into the dark bowels of the building.
We descended into a gigantic basement. The place was a frigid labyrinth of polished marble and gleaming crystals. In the exact center, a stage adorned with heavy red curtains displayed a pedestal. Upon it rested a grimoire—a profane and silent detail replacing the traditional bible.
Curiously, the terror of the environment contrasted with the scene around us: our two entire families were there, united, laughing, and socializing like in the old days. The human mind loves to mask danger with familiar faces.
The Theater of Shadows and Collective Apathy
While the party was going on, the absurd began to infiltrate. A child tried to extort five thousand dollars from me for a plastic bracelet. The childish scam masked greater threats looming just above.
On the elevated marble bridge, figures began to move. They were shadows with sharp outlines, yet devoid of faces. One of them, sporting a blurred badge, purposely broke the bridge’s structure, causing massive blocks of stone to plummet exactly where I had been standing with my father moments before. Trying to return to the car, I was intercepted by another entity—a being with dreadlocks and a makeshift badge with the letters “808” or “BOB”. With a cynical smile and deceitful movements, he chased me as the heavy church gates locked behind us.
The main event was delayed. With the hall emptying and my partner overcome with sadness, we went to the stage to demand answers. After a rushed blessing, the curtains opened to chaos. Distant relatives of hers, dressed as eccentric island pirates, performed an acrobatic number that quickly spun out of control. They pulled her, tossed her into the air, and let her body plummet violently, flat on her back, against the hard floor.
The expression of agony on her face was absolute. However, the true nightmare wasn’t the fall, but the silence that followed. No one in the audience moved. The greatest terror the mind can conceive is not the monster hiding in the shadows, but the total and brutal apathy of those we love in the face of our pain.
Fueled by a primal fury, I invaded the stage. I checked her vital signs and rescued her in my arms, exactly as I do when I carry her to bed in the waking world, under the light of a cold spotlight that illuminated only the indifference of the spectators.
The Relentless Sentence
Suddenly, the fabric of the dream rewrote its own perspective. I was no longer on stage, but back in the audience, observing the perfectly friendly interaction of our families. In the midst of them, an elderly, bedridden relative was crying copiously and uncontrollably, for no apparent reason.
It was in that millisecond of inexplicable grief that the underlying truth of that labyrinth revealed itself: the entire event was our pre-wedding ceremony.
But the relief of understanding was strangled as soon as it was born. From the midst of the empty crowd, a faceless voice decreed a relentless sentence: we could no longer get married.
There was no justification. There was no negotiation. Just an absolute and arbitrary prohibition that echoed through the marble walls like an unbreakable universal law, crushing the air with an emotional weight so devastating that the dream could no longer bear to exist, shattering at the exact moment of awakening.