Vachon Imagined

No barriers remain to reveal.

She sits across from someone who looks nothing like her. Different skin. Different history. Different prayers whispered over childhood dinners. One carries the memory of being watched in every store they entered; the other carries the inheritance of never having to notice the watching at all. Between them sits more than a table. Between them sits race, politics, sexuality, class, survival, grief, resentment, pride—generations of memory convinced of their own righteousness.

Their words begin carefully, then sharpen into weapons forged long before either of them was born. One speaks of injustice, of systems designed to bend the human spirit until endurance is mistaken for freedom. The other speaks of responsibility, sacrifice, and the exhaustion of being blamed for wounds they did not personally create. Each believes the other cannot understand. Each carries pain invisible to the other.

The conversation becomes a volley.

Statistics against lived experience. History against individual effort. Fear against fear. Politics ricocheting between them like a frantic ping-pong ball neither knows how to stop hitting. Their voices rise because identity feels threatened. Because every human being protects the story that explains their suffering, their morality, their place in the world.

Then one of them reaches forward, catches the ball midair, and sets it down.

In that instant, the argument collapses. Not because difference disappears, but because something deeper is seen. No human being has ever encountered another except through the mirror of their own consciousness. Every judgment, every certainty, every hatred and devotion first moves through the architecture of the self before it touches the world outside it.

This is how humanity sees God. Consciousness recognizing itself through another form. Intelligence moving outward into race, politics, identity, suffering, and history, only to return to its source.

Beneath every ideology lives the same awareness looking through different eyes. Beneath every argument stands the same human fear: the fear of not being seen, loved, understood; not being allowed to exist without defense.

Meanwhile, there is still a heaven, a place, a scenery that we all know, no matter our skin color, sexuality or creed, that peace begins the moment someone becomes strong enough to stop throwing the ball.

To stop seeing through day old perception.