Vachon Imagined

The image she held in her mind became her god until it no longer satisfied her.

It began as something almost merciful—soft-focus, edible, harmless enough to believe in. A way to keep herself from drifting too far out of reach. If she could stay close to the image, she could stay close to herself. That was the logic. That was the prayer.

She learned early how to orbit her own body.

Not inhabit it. Orbit it.

Close enough to perform life convincingly. Far enough to avoid the places where memory refused to stay intact. There are childhoods that do not become stories so much as atmospheres—charged, uneven air that follows you into rooms you swear are new.

She never named what sat at the center of that weather system.

She didn’t need to.

Her mind had already done what minds do when the body knows something the language cannot hold—it built scaffolding. Meaning where there should have been rupture. Narrative where there should have been fracture. An image she could circle safely without ever touching the center.

And it worked, for a time.

The image became devotion.

Not God in the holy sense, but God in the structural one. Something that held the chaos in place. Something she could kneel to without realizing she was kneeling.

Even desire got folded into it.

Like that piece of cake from Outback—the one too glossy to be innocent, too sweet to be simple. Chocolate so dense it felt like it was trying to convince you of something. Pleasure staged at a safe distance, familiar enough to swallow without questioning what hunger it was actually feeding.

She remembers thinking it was indulgence.

But it was always substitution.

A controlled sweetness to replace something unnameable. Something older than appetite. Something that lived closer to absence than want.

Because the body keeps its own ledger.

Even when the mind is busy building altars.

And there were nights—more than she admitted—when she hovered just outside herself, watching her own life the way you watch someone else eating dessert in a restaurant window. Wanting it. Not trusting it. Not entirely inside it.

Then the image began to fail her.

Not in collapse. In detail.

Edges sharpening. Meaning thinning. The god she had constructed out of repetition and avoidance started to reveal its seams.

And with that failure came something colder than grief.

Recognition.

That she had not been worshipping truth.

She had been maintaining distance.

From a self she had never fully been taught how to enter.

So when she thinks of the cake now, it is not sweetness she remembers.

It is how carefully sweetness can be staged.

How easily it can stand in for something else.

And how long a person can survive on substitutions before they start to feel like hunger itself is the only honest thing left.

She does not rebuild the image.

She stops circling.

Not all at once.

But enough to feel the difference between orbiting and arriving.

And that difference is where the god finally ends.