Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I’m delighted to share this month’s Micro of the Month writing challenge winner below. The theme was “Marriage” and we ended up getting 896 submissions! I think this is our highest (or second-highest) yet for the micro challenge. There was such a wide variety of takes on the themes, some folks wrote about marriage straight up while others wrote about divorce, a day in the life of a spouse, polyamorous love, betrayal, witches marrying cryptids, some folks took the micro into wonderfully surreal directions while others wrote rooted in realism. All in all, the choice was tough. But I am certain you will fall in love with this month’s winner below.
Next month’s call opens on October 1st and the theme will be revealed very soon!!
Because what’s the point of it all, when after so many years together, so much sneaking and hiding, so many decisions, particularly the one to spend the rest of your lives together, to work overtime to afford the stamp duty payments, the sworn translations, the bus and train tickets to Frankfurt, never telling the clerk why you needed your certificates of birth, civil status, and residence, exchanging currency at a terrible rate, google-translating the correspondence with the officials, setting the ceremony date, picking two second-hand white dresses, getting them all crumpled during the journey, hours of exhaustion, then another bus to the registry office, spending all the euros for more stamp duties, checking how to say yes, I do in German, all of that to obtain the certificates of marriage issued in a language in which you cannot pronounce I love you, unrecognizable in your own home country, in which you are still just two individual adults sharing an apartment, barely leaving it to avoid disapproving looks and occasional insults, it’s easier to stay inside, safely wait for something that might never happen, and when after legal battles between higher and lower authorities, after endless appeals by artists or sportswomen or other married pairs who dared to leave their apartments, it happened, the bureaucracy is compelled to allow transcriptions of same-sex marriages, and actually starts doing so, and you can do it right from home, just need the sworn translation of that useless foreign marriage certificates, a few online forms and stamp duty payments, and her signature under all the documents, just a few scribbles of her beautiful name, only for her to look you emptily in the eye and utter blandly that she doesn’t feel like it?
Contributor’s Note
Until May 2026, Polish administation did not recognize same-sex marriages contracted in other EU countries, which resulted in a legal paradox, where some LGBTQIA+ couples would be married in one country and single in another. But did they love each other in either one? I wanted to tackle this sensitive topic to underline the tangled, ever-changing nature of love and how it intertwines with marriage, no matter if it’s homo- or heterosexual.
Huge thanks for Miłość Nie Wyklucza (mnw.org.pl) for providing approachable guides for transripting a foreign marriage certificate and marrying abroad as a same-sex couple in Poland or other EU country that does not register same-sex marriages!
Norka is always writing something – usually in Polish, often in English, sometimes in both. She runs a fledgling Substack and sporadically wins second prize in literary competitions.
So good, the end hit me like a pinch in the gut in the best way!
The last line, especially with your uptick of expression, was a knockout. Great piece.