Vachon Imagined

“But I am sexy,” she would cry, while men and women alike stitched her together with needles and thorns.

A bride upon a stage, much like Frankenstein’s creation—pieced together by wounded time, by shame, by accusations thrown from mouths too frightened to face the darkness living within themselves.

So she began to disappear.

She folded herself inward and listened carefully to the stories told about women like her—women condemned for desire, punished for beauty, crucified for existing too loudly inside their own skin. Stories told most fiercely by those unwilling to look directly at their own reflection.

And so she hid.

Not behind walls, but behind expectations.
Behind rehearsed softness.
Behind the exhausting performance of what she was supposed to be.

She abandoned the wild and radiant parts of herself, suppressing the very nature she had been taught was inappropriate, dangerous, sinful—worse still, something existing only for the consumption of men, never for the belonging of herself.

So the fire within her became quiet.
Not extinguished—only buried beneath guilt, beneath fear, beneath generations of inherited shame.

Yet somewhere underneath the stitching and the thorns, she still remained.

Waiting for the moment she would no longer ask permission to exist.