Vachon Imagined

It was already written that she would die. Her grandfather said it like it meant nothing: we are all going to die.

But a child doesn’t understand death. A child doesn’t understand anything that isn’t happening right now.

Now is the whole universe. Now is the whole self.

There is no separation yet. No ego scaffolding. No adult economy of people dividing life into winners and the exhausted. No concept of being split off from anything.

A child is still whole. Still unbroken. Still dangerous in its completeness.

It’s the closest thing to God we get—and then we immediately train it out.

We call it growing up, but it’s really reduction. We take what is infinite and make it manageable. We teach it where it ends. We teach it what it is not. We teach it how to be alone inside its own skin.

And it learns.

That’s the part that works.

Her grandfather, later turned saint in memory, was already repeating borrowed certainty. He had already forgotten what she still knows without knowing she knows it.

And the rest is just time doing what it always does: turning wholeness into distance.