Vachon Imagined

Nostalgia, a dear old friend, waited patiently in the wings until I was old enough to listen — old enough to care about what memory was trying to resurrect inside me.

Its whispers began long before I understood their meaning. They echoed through childhood streets while I skated beneath the summer sun, wheels glowing faintly beneath me like little lanterns carrying me forward toward nowhere distinct. Nowhere named. I had no destination. No ambition beyond movement itself. To leave. To be.

To belong to the streets for a little while.

There was a freedom in that aimlessness impossible to explain to adults, who always demanded purpose from movement. But children understand instinctively that wandering can itself be a form of salvation. I skated through neighborhoods with liberty as my only compass, the hot pavement humming beneath me, the wind erasing thought before it could fully form.

And for those brief hours, no one could reach me.

No one stood over me to name me.
No one judged me.
Not even the witness inside myself.

She, too, had gone quiet. Silenced by motion, by heat, by exhaustion, by the strange chemistry of temporary peace — the kind so fragile it almost feels offensive once you’ve known suffering deeply enough. A balance so delicate it feels contradictory, almost repugnant, because the body does not know how to trust relief when it has spent so long preparing for pain.

But the streets asked nothing of me.

To them, I was not wounded.
Not broken.
Not watched.

I was only movement.

Only a child skating endlessly beneath an open sky, untouched by the language of trauma, untouched even by thought itself. I was not nostalgic then because nostalgia requires separation, and I had not yet been separated from freedom. I did not yet understand what it meant to lose a moment while still living inside it.

I only knew the sacred command spoken to children of summer:

Come home when the streetlights turn on.

And until then, I belonged to no one.

Those skates — white, almost impossibly pure in memory — had been bought by my grandfather in an ordinary store, though I doubt he understood what he was truly giving me. Not skates. Wings. A temporary escape velocity from myself.

Even now, memory holds them the way lakes hold drowned reflections: distorted by time, but never fully erased.

And somewhere beneath the melancholy, beneath the ache that nostalgia disguises as beauty, the spirit of that child still moves through me with a quiet but relentless demand:

Remember me.

Remember the freedom before you learned fear.
Remember the lie hidden inside nostalgia — how memory softens even the unbearable until it glows gold around the edges.
Remember so that when melancholy speaks in my voice, you will know the difference between mourning and worship.
Remember that there was once a version of you who moved without shame, without history, without the terrible weight of self-awareness.

Remember her before the world taught her to stop moving.