Vachon Imagined

The boy with the skinned knee cried for his mother the way soldiers cry on the battlefield:

Someone help me.
Someone save me.
Make this pain go away.

And later, a woman was crushed beneath that same cry until something inside her gave way. It defied logic, time, space, even science itself, and still she found it: an almost hallucinatory wisdom, a light—described inadequately by every language that tried to contain it—that expanded her heart and cooperated with her vision. Or perhaps it gave her vision entirely.

Why not? It gives everything.

It gave the boy his wounded knee.
It gave the mother her instinct to protect.
It gave pain its voice and tenderness its hands.

And it passes itself back and forth between them until, slowly, the person begins to understand that the hand they are tasting is their own. Their own suffering. Their own humanity. Their own life returning to them through every wound, every comfort, every unbearable moment of being alive.

And as they taste it, they cry:

Do not take the cup away too soon.
Let me experience my humanity without judging it, without ripping it from my hands before I have understood what it came here to teach me.