Vachon Imagined

Please — show me recognition so I no longer have to clap for myself in the dark corners of crowded rooms, no longer have to starve beside my own heartbeat begging for affection, for praise, for one sacred glance that says: you belong here too.

Are we there yet?
She turned the temperature higher and higher, as if heat itself could cauterize feeling, could silence the terrible intimacy of being alive — the boredom, the craving, the endless ache of inhabiting her own skin.

Are we there yet?
As every girl before her was chosen for the dance, for the spotlight, for the soft coronations handed out so casually to others. She watched applause fall upon them like divine weather while she stood outside the sanctuary of recognition, imagining herself only in hidden places, in forbidden rooms where voices — parents, teachers, powers seated in the front row of the world — told her she was not allowed to enter.

They did not know better.
They only knew power.
And power, when inherited unconsciously, mistakes limitation for love.

Then something shifted the day she stopped asking.
The silence after the question became its own country.

Yet still her heart ached at the sight of how easily others seemed to ascend — so effortlessly, so nonchalantly — as if they had escaped the gravity that pinned her spirit to the earth, as if they were born fluent in a language she was still begging to hear.

And there she remained, whispering from the back of the auditorium the same prayer she carried as a child, the same question echoing through the chambers of becoming:

Are we there yet?

Goddammit —
are we there yet?