Vachon Imagined

How do you know? she asked.
How can a mouth speak with such certainty of things that perish?

And they answered:
Because of the way it moves through me.
Because of the tremor it leaves behind.
Because even dying stars still burn against the dark long after their bodies are gone.

But she could not rest there.
For feelings, too, are wandering spirits.
They arrive like weather through an open window and vanish before dawn.
They move in and out of the chambers of the heart the way people slip through a lifetime — silently, suddenly, without covenant or warning.

So she carried the question like a hidden lantern.

How do you know?

She sat beside it for years, feeding it pieces of herself.
And still, now at the today-old age of fifty-one — that haunted threshold where memory becomes both predator and prayer — the wondering remains.
Remembrance circles her like a patient bird of prey, picking softly at the hours of ordinary life.

Still the question breathes.

How can I hold this knowing?
How can I place it in my hands like water that does not spill?
How can I command what forever dissolves?

And somewhere beneath the noise of living, an answer began to form:

The permission is hidden inside the asking.

To question is already to open the gate.

But no gate stays open on its own.
Like all sacred instruments, the soul must be lifted daily, worn daily, sharpened against existence.
The tool is life itself — strange, feral, luminous — and to wield it is to enter into command of one’s becoming.

Not command as conquest,
but command as surrender to a deeper current.

For the only way to shape reality
is to cease clinging to the small self that names itself permanent.

Not this self that mistakes breath for eternity.
Not this self that believes it is merely flesh walking toward disappearance.

But the older self.
The hidden self.
The self beneath the self — vast as night water, untouched by death, dreaming through all your temporary names.