Vachon Imagined

Standing on the level of departure, she lingered there contemplating whether to step across the line and venture into the next world.

The platform she stood on had always kept her safe. There were no demands there. No poetry to long for. No terrible hunger asking to be fed. No need yet to choose between silence and becoming.

Avoiding distraction was not yet an option available to her, though she wanted it desperately. She wanted the tyranny of ordinary life — the comfort of soiled objects, daylong worn threads, the familiar indecencies replayed faithfully year after year. She wanted repetition. Ritual. The safety of remaining unchanged.

She wanted all of it.

But as she stared over the threshold toward the waiting train, she wondered quietly:

Can I return here?

And a voice answered:

Anytime you want.

So she stepped aboard.

Destination unknown.

The train carried her toward some peculiar new land where people hid themselves behind newspapers, where lovers disappeared inside songs, where entire lives unfolded in silence beside one another beneath flickering lights.

She observed them all. Felt all of it pressing against her at once — loneliness, longing, performance, escape, desire.

For a moment she wondered whether to join them fully or remain only a witness to the world.

But silence was no longer an option.

And so she turned once more toward the girl she had been — the girl who would always remain standing at the station, suspended forever at the edge of departure.

Only now she understood:

the girl was no longer waiting to cross the threshold.

She already had.

And she would continue crossing it again and again for the rest of her life, always returning in memory to the original place where the world first opened before her — where she crossed into the next world, where she crossed into the next century.