Two weeks ago, my friends organized a bachelorette celebration for me.
It was funny. Joyful. Loud at times. Tender too. Two days spent laughing, talking, dancing, remembering, and watching life move forward before my eyes while I still could not fully hold onto it.
Then came the return.
The silence after the celebration.
The road.
And me alone with my thoughts.
I thought again about those two days, about love, about life, about the woman I am slowly becoming, almost despite myself.
Most of all, I thought about the girl I used to be. About what she would still want to tell me so that I may never stop existing fully within the woman I am about to become.
So here is my article for the month of May:

To the young girl I am burying as I come to understand that I am no longer one.
To the woman I approach with both tenderness and caution, like an unfamiliar land.
To the child I am leaving behind while begging her never to leave me entirely.
To life renewing itself.
To new desires disturbing the old ones.

To you who still believed, without truly lying to yourself, in the beauty of a solitary candle.
To you who loved solitude enough to turn it into a home.
To you who faced your thirties without fear because you were waiting for no one.
To you who prayed for a freedom emptied of love so that you would never suffer its loss.
To you who nevertheless dreamed, quietly, of a family.

To you who once were me.
To me, who still remembers you.

I remember the road that led me to this strange betrayal:
the betrayal of giving up certain solitudes without feeling that I had betrayed myself.

You who loved being alone so deeply, here you are consenting to a life shared with another.
You who defended your freedom so fiercely, here you are learning that love sometimes requires renunciations.
You who loved the candle, here you are embracing the sun.

And yet, here you are remaining faithful to certain promises of yesterday:
the promise of building a life with someone else.

Here you are with flaws you never knew you had, revealed by that strange territory called the beginning of “us.”
Here you are expecting from someone else and from yourself what once you expected from no one.
Here you are disappointed sometimes.
Here you are loving awkwardly the one you may have been waiting for all along.
Loving him badly at times.
Loving him the way one loves after living alone for too long: with too much fear, too much pride, too many silences.

And yet, being loved despite all of that.

Here you are, the wife of an imperfect man who is not afraid of your imperfections.
Here you are surrendering yourself to life once again.
Here you are saying to the child you once were:
“You see… perhaps all of this meant something after all.”
Here you are asking the woman you are becoming to keep searching for meaning when life is no longer gentle.
Here you are thanking the young girl you are burying today.
Here you are standing before the sea, dreamy, thinking about the mother you would like to become.
Here you are looking at your clumsiness with more tenderness than shame.

To you who were promised a “better half,”
I wish that you may never stop being whole.
To you who were taught that love proves itself through sacrifice and that naturally, the sacrifice should come from you.
To you who fell in love and discovered, in the fall itself, that two people stand differently together than one stands alone.
Remember, from time to time, the young girl you are burying today.
Do not let the woman betray her.

May the past never poison tomorrow.

May you love without lying to yourself.
May you forgive without betraying yourself.
May you share without being ordered to.
May you give yourself without being forced to.

And above all: may you become a woman without ever ceasing to be yourself.

Written by Aliane UMUTONIWASE