Vachon Imagined

In a world determined to define love, we reduce it to conditions, then glamorize the conditions as though they were love itself.

I will stay if you behave correctly.
I will not wound you if you do not wound me.
I will give to you, provided you continue giving to me.

And somewhere within these silent negotiations, marriage, partnership, even friendship can become less a union of souls and more an arrangement of territory.

I own you.
You own me.
Now let us call this living.

But this is not living.
This is the walking dead learning how to smile convincingly.

It is a kind of programming — inherited, rehearsed, rewarded. Culture nurtures it endlessly, dressing conditionality in beautiful clothing, pushing whatever version sells the fastest, gains the most approval, attracts the most attention. What makes the most money becomes truth. What gains the most likes becomes morality. And so humanity chases itself in circles, exhausted by a hunger it keeps mistaking for love.

But love does not chase.

Love is.

It exists before language touches it. Before religion names it. Before society markets it back to us in pieces. It does not bargain the way humans bargain. It does not keep ledgers, demand performances, or build prisons out of fear and call them commitment.

Love simply moves according to its nature, the way oceans move, the way light moves, the way breath enters the lungs without needing applause for its generosity.

And strangely, the closer a human being comes to this nature, the less they need to perform. The less they speak unnecessarily. The less they force. The more they listen. The more they soften enough to hear what has always been underneath the noise.

Love is not something you manufacture.
It is something you uncover.

And once you glimpse its landscape, even for a moment, you cannot entirely return to sleep. Something in you recognizes it with terrifying familiarity, as though you have spent your whole life wandering away from your own home.

Then begins the deeper calling.

Not to possess love.
Not to control it.
But to follow it.

Into the deep.
Deeper still.