The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.

The sentence compresses into a single morning the shock of crossing a threshold: marriage and sexual initiation are figured not as continuity but as rupture. Colette’s piling up of images—“a thousand miles,” “abyss,” “discovery,” “irremediable metamorphosis”—suggests that the change is at once spatial (a felt distance from one’s former self), existential (an abyss), and epistemic (a discovery that cannot be undiscovered). The tone is not celebratory; it implies disorientation and irreversible loss of innocence, as if the self of “the day before” has become unreachable. In Colette’s work, such moments often expose the costs of social roles imposed on women and the complex, bodily realities beneath romantic narratives.