Vachon Imagined

Before she was adorned, she was alive.
Before the red shades of sweaters gathered around her shoulders like borrowed seasons, she was alive.
Before she reached for anything beyond herself, breath already moved through her like scripture.

Before she donned the names, the roles, the trembling disguises, she was untouched by the theater of captivity. Yet how swiftly she forgot — how swiftly the mind hardens into walls built by invisible captors, by stolen relics, by landscapes never painted yet somehow mourned.

Before she reached, she was you.
Before she was reached, she was mine.

Not mine in possession, but in remembrance —
the way the moon belongs to the tide,
the way silence belongs to prayer,
the way all living things belong first to the unnamed light that dreamed them here.