Vachon Imagined

She walks home
in a daze,
a fog,
a numbness
that has become her only shadow,
her only name.

The fog remembers them—
the ones who promised love
but delivered only control.
The lies they told,
sweet as honey,
laced with poison,
the promises that were never hers,
stolen before she could even hold them,
before she could know
what a life untouched might feel like.

They took her innocence.
Not gently.
Never softly.
It was never hers to keep,
always theirs—
a treasure they would display
and call it devotion.
Each smile, each glance, each word,
a theft disguised as care,
a cage disguised as protection.

She pushes through the fog—
but cannot.
It is too thick.
Her voice lies behind it,
buried beneath echoes
of “you are not enough,”
“you owe us,”
“you will forget.”

The streets are empty,
but the fog is alive.
It whispers of what was done,
hands that took without asking,
eyes that turned away,
mouths that spoke with sugar-coated knives,
rewriting her story
in someone else’s ink.

Numbness becomes armor.
Numbness becomes pain.
Numbness becomes the only assurance
that she is not alone.

And yet it keeps her
lonely,
hidden,
trapped.

Pushing through won’t work—
the fog is too clever,
too patient,
too greedy.

So she falls into it.

And in the fall,
she meets herself—
the child they tried to erase,
the fire they tried to smother,
the voice they tried to silence.

Facing the fog,
she is enraptured.
She walks through it
with a new nightgown,
with a new name,
fallen asleep too
because of the fog,
because of the memory she could not name—
only the memory she knows
in dark spaces
where senses are censored
and the fog is born of pain.

And yet the fire has never left her.

Even as the fog tries to claim her,
the fire answers.
Even as the lies whisper,
her voice begins to answer back.

She moves like wind
through the halls of her own sovereignty,
like light passing through temples
built of her own understanding,
each step dissolving chains,
each breath reclaiming herself,
each heartbeat a ritual of awakening.

The fog trembles.
Because she has learned to dance with it,
to let it flow through her,
to let it remind her
of the strength she has always carried.

She walks—
no longer in a daze,
no longer shadowed.

She walks awake,
bearing the fire of her own life,
the voice that cannot be stolen,
the innocence she reclaims
not from them,
but from herself—
an inheritance they could never touch.

She is untamed.
She is sovereign.
She is the fog and the fire,
the thief and the witness,
the child and the woman.

Her hand pushes
through the grave.

And as she emerges,
the world bends to witness:
she is hers,
always hers,
and no fog,
no lie,
no theft
can ever take that again.