Vachon Imagined

She saw the hourglass on her grandmother’s television, an heirloom, balanced between the flickering scenes of The Young and the Restless on summer afternoons and the peanut butter and jelly sandwich clutched in her hand. She would stare at it, mesmerized, wondering how sand could measure time, and slowly let her mind slip into its tiny world. Back and forth, back and forth—her imagination was all she had, a fragile refuge where fathers did unthinkable things and brothers followed in their footsteps.

It was her imagination that leapt into the hourglass, carrying her to God, to the endless bottom, to the force that drew everything downward. She could enter and exit at will, yet one truth remained: she could not change it. Time itself was untouchable—she could only learn its rhythms, much like she navigated the peanut butter and jelly in her hand, wishing it were caviar, wishing for different parents, for a different life.

Inside that hourglass, she discovered a subtle power. She could shift the sand—move it quickly, move it slowly—but its essence remained, unchangeable, necessary, sacred. And she did not want it otherwise. She still cherished the heirloom, the sand, the horror itself. Through her imagination, clutching anything that offered a physical anchor, she found a way to navigate time another way, through another time. She could bend its rhythm, stretch its moments, feel both the crushing weight and the delicate lightness of it all, learning not to escape time, but to flow within it, as if she were both inside and outside the hourglass of time, the endless and boundless nature of herself.