Vachon Imagined

It sat within her like an open hand — ancient, patient — reminding her through countless seasons and countless undoings to steady her pace, to return her care to it.

Even in the good years, when ambition filled her lungs like fire and she mistook movement for destiny, the hand remained.

It watched as she charted her little boat into tumultuous seas, into the devouring weather of human attachment — that strange world of relationships, both inanimate and human, where everything eventually asks to be lost.

Work hard.
Drive harder.
Become something.
Prove yourself worthy of remaining.

Only to be released in the end.
Cast out.
Cast aside.
Returned to the great anonymous tide from which all things briefly emerge.

But the casting no longer wounded her the way it once had, because the hand captures everything.

It was like a sacred vessel in a perpetual state of renewal, endlessly emptying and receiving.
Not a trashcan, no — something holier than that.
A silent mouth at the edge of existence swallowing every name, every grief, every triumph without judgment.

And it waits.

It waits for the noise of life to soften.
Waits for striving to exhaust itself.
Waits for the performance of selfhood to loosen its grip.

So life itself may be renewed.

The handing over, she realized, is intimate.
Almost impossibly easy.
A gifted thing.

What is difficult is not dying into the current.

What is difficult is living inside the storm.

To wake each day inside the machinery of longing.
To continue carrying the unbearable brilliance of being alive.
To love despite endings.
To remain soft in a world that survives by hardening.

That is harder.

That is the true exhaustion.