Vachon Imagined

Time does not care.

Not for the perpetual motion, nor the endless scenes rehearsed beneath collapsing skies. Time can roll onto its back and kick its legs into the heavens the way a tornado lifts houses like children’s toys — effortlessly, without remorse, without memory.

Reach for the baton.
Reach for the achievement.
For one suspended moment, time may appear to pause in reverence — but time does not care.

It does not care about your straight A’s, nor the lonely nights you lay flat on your back praying for the perfect man, the perfect bride, the perfect salvation to descend through the ceiling of your wanting.

Time does not care.
It feeds the whore and the Madonna from the same invisible hand. It crowns them equally before dragging both toward the mouth of oblivion. The only difference is that each believes herself capable of bargaining with the inevitable, capable of rearranging the tides through performance, beauty, suffering, virtue.

But time is older than performance.
Older than innocence.
Older than grief.

And the only thing a person can truly do is break through the resistance of their own mind, survive the devastation of their own body, and continue walking despite the ruins they carry within them.

That is the litmus test.
Not success.
Not purity.
Not recognition.

Endurance.

To withstand the terrible weight of living long enough to witness the other side of suffering — to step through one age of the self and into another. To become ancient enough within your own spirit that time no longer feels like punishment, but passage.

To see another time.