Vachon Imagined

Effortlessly, she became full of effort.

The way she would quietly slip a post or two or three into her husband’s hands, hoping that one day he might understand. That he might finally see her. Not the functioning version of her. Not the agreeable version. Her.

But connection is difficult when walls harden into personality, when defenses become indistinguishable from identity. People live inside these carefully erected structures and call them themselves. They step briefly into vulnerability, into alternate versions of life, but the moment they feel unfamiliar to themselves, they retreat in panic. Some blame the other person. Some blame their own longing.

It is a lyrical game of cat and mouse:
I disappear before you can abandon me.
I retreat before you can witness who I am without the architecture.

“More flattery,” she thought, while he explained in soft rehearsed phrases, somewhere between mischief and quiet dishonesty, that he felt most loved through words of affirmation.

So she changed.

Holding back nausea at the performance of it, she changed.

She forced sweetness through clenched teeth. Learned new dialects of affection that felt foreign in her mouth. She kept walking through the bruises left behind by her own betrayals of self, convincing herself this is what marriage was—small daily funerals no one acknowledged aloud.

And still, it was not enough.

Because loneliness does not disappear simply because another body occupies the room.

That was the great horror of it.

To lie beside someone for years and remain untouched.
To become emotionally translucent.
To slowly realize your inner life has gone almost entirely unwitnessed.

There are forms of loneliness so deep they begin to alter a person’s shape. She could feel it happening in real time. The silence inside her growing ancient. Needs going unmet for so long they no longer even sounded like needs, only echoes. She stopped asking for certain things because asking required hope, and hope, repeated enough without response, becomes humiliation.

So she built a circle around herself.

Not because she wanted to be alone, but because abandonment feels less violent when self-inflicted.

And inside that circle she suffered quietly, almost beautifully. The kind of suffering adulthood rewards because it remains functional. She still smiled at people. Still completed errands. Still answered texts. Still folded laundry. Meanwhile entire continents inside her went dark.

The older she became, and the longer she stayed married, the more she realized something devastating:

No proclamation of forever could protect a person from isolation.
No shared address could guarantee intimacy.
No amount of endurance could force two souls to arrive at the same place at the same time.

And so she met herself there instead.

Alone.
The way she always had been.