Vachon Imagined

The “I AM” lingered within her for all the world to see.

“I am this branch,” she would say, reaching toward herself with trembling certainty, and the world would answer, No, not that. Go back. Go back to who you were before the branch began to bloom.

So she crawled inward through shame—through the long vestibule of guilt lined with portraits of every woman and man who had come before her. Generations hanging like faded paintings upon cathedral walls. An inheritance of control seeping through the hallway of humanity, even after the soul itself had already been born pure.

But purity became clogged by misperception.
By time.
By fear disguised as order.

Control this.
Legalize this.
Condemn that.
Turn human beings into spectacles of themselves until they become frightened of their own nature, terrified of their own existence.

And still, something inside her refused to die.

So she stopped trying to become acceptable.

Instead, she became both the vine and the branches.

Each branch carried its own glory.
Each movement of her voice opened like petals meeting the luminous breath of dawn. She no longer bent herself into smaller forms for the comfort of trembling minds. She began to understand that existence itself was not a crime, and that the soul does not bloom by permission.

It blooms because it must.