Vachon Imagined

“Oh, you lonely souls, you slow-moving pedestrians—detach yourselves from freedom. Be the lad your father created you to be, with your stolen gratitudes of fantasy etched in stone and worshipped at the shrine.”

“Detach,” she would mutter under her breath, now married to the man she had affirmed into being through the church that showed her how; losing any sense of selflessness as they taught her instead to construct a self that was never permanent, just as her dream was never permanent.

The man she etched into her mind—you know the one: makes 200, 300 thousand a year, never farts in bed, always knows the perfect salutation.

Resurrect the harm to create the foe she now saw through all her bedtime prayers. Her knight in shining armor had come true, only he lacked imagination.

Ah damn—the one thing he forgot to ask for.

The provider turned cold. She wanted Mary Poppins; he wanted golden showers and TV dinners.

“Detach,” he still insisted. “Detach, you wayward souls, you fucking tyrants.”

Detach—

until he realized he had only clung.

Clung to memory. Clung to fantasy. Just like Mary Poppins, just like the song she sang to millions of children—now adults—who still sing along today.