Vachon Imagined

She sat at the edge of what might be called witness.
Not as authority, but as presence through which things briefly became legible.

She witnessed his despair.

And in some quieter recognition, she understood it was not only his.
It had already passed through her—unclaimed, unnamed, still forming.

He knew this too, or something like it.
Not as thought, but as exposure.

So when she went to see him again, when she moved toward what should have been his body, there was already a fracture in the meaning of arrival.

Because what she found did not hold itself together as fact.

It had already begun to loosen from certainty.

And in that loosening, she was no longer only witness.

She was the one left carrying what had been seen.

The one through whom it would be spoken, or vanish entirely.

Not because witnessing creates reality in any final sense—
but because without it, nothing remains stable long enough to agree it happened.

What is not held in witness does not disappear.

It fails to become anything that can remain.