Vachon Imagined

Violence to some children
becomes a war of remembrance—
not one strike, but many doors closing
softly inside the skull,
a country of moments refusing to stay still.

She learns early
how identity can be stolen
without hands,
how a name can drift away
and come back wearing someone else’s face.

There is a girl
who makes religion out of small things—
her curls, carefully arranged like offerings,
as if symmetry could bargain with chaos,
as if perfection might negotiate her return to herself.

But the world misreads devotion.
Calls it vanity.
Calls it distance.
Never sees the altar burning quietly
beneath her skin.

And so survival becomes music
no one admits they are hearing—
a war-song disguised as ordinary air,
a rhythm of almosts and not-quites,
of mornings that arrive too loudly
for a body still learning what safety means.

No body tolerates it.
So the mind builds hallways—
endless, inward corridors of forgetting,
doors that lead only to other doors,
light flickering like a memory
that refuses to be named.

She walks them
first in a tethered nightgown,
threadbare with endurance,
stitched from nights that would not end,
walls pressing close
like they want something back.

Then—something changes.

The fabric loosens.

The halls begin to forget their own sharpness.
Edges soften like breath on glass.
Even the air starts to hesitate
before becoming fear.

She moves through them again—
but now the walls do not accuse.
They listen.
They hold color like water holds sky,
no longer separate from her bones,
no longer guards at the threshold of her mind.

And slowly—almost imperceptibly—
the haunting learns a different language.

Not disappearance.
Not erasure.
But surrender.

The girl becomes a body again
that is not only memory,
not only fracture,
but something continuous—
something allowed to stay.

The nightgown becomes light,
not torn away, but transformed—
thread by thread into dawn,
into breath that does not flinch
at its own arrival.

And the hallways—
those long, faithful ghosts—
open at last into something wider:

a room without corners,
a sky that does not repeat itself,
a quiet so complete
it no longer needs to be survived.