He stood just outside the vestibule, humming the Sarah McLachlan song she loved, hoping the melody might steady his hands. Each note felt thin, breakable, like a bridge made of breath. The vows waiting inside pressed against his ribs, heavy as stones. Always was a word he could say, but not one he could hold. It lay on his tongue like something borrowed, something he knew he’d return damaged.
He wanted to marry her — God, he did. She was the first woman who made the idea feel less like a cage and more like a door. But even as he stood there, he felt the old sickness rise: the fear of belonging to one person, the fear of being known too closely, the fear of disappointing her in ways he couldn’t yet name.
The counselors had told her not to change him. They told him the same thing in softer words. But he saw the manual in her eyes, the recipe she kept offering, the blueprint she hoped he’d follow. He wanted to be the man she believed he could be. He wanted to walk into that kitchen and learn the steps. But wanting and becoming were oceans apart, and he was already drowning in the distance.
He knew he would fail her. Not out of malice, but out of the quiet fractures inside him — the ones he never learned to name, the ones he hid behind charm, silence, or the wrong kind of comfort. He knew she would retreat into her own shadows, her own betrayals, her own silence. He knew they would both call it love while carving themselves thin trying to make it fit.
Years later, he would admit it to himself: he was a good man, but a terrible husband. The truth sat on a shelf inside him, gathering dust until the day it returned like a train whistle looping the same track, calling him back to the station he’d never left.
A place where always was a promise he could speak, but never keep. A place where forever came to die.
Vachon Imagined 
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