The Bride Who Never Was

The clock reads twenty to nine. It has read twenty to nine for thirty years. People think I stopped it out of madness. I stopped it because that was the last moment I was a person — the last moment before I became a lesson, a warning, a joke. Before that minute, I was Catherine Havisham, brewery heiress, bride-to-be, fool. After it, I was nothing. And nothing does not need clocks. Nothing does not need daylight. Nothing sits in its dress and its cake and waits, not for him to return — I am not that far gone — but for the world to understand what it did to me.