Vachon Imagined

“Are you self-aware?” he asked with an illuminating yet bereft tone, emptied of any assumption about what my answer might be.

My mind began to race. I didn’t know what to say. It was the familiar human collision of fight, flight, and freeze—the helpless panic of being placed suddenly beneath a light too bright to escape. Like sitting in an interrogation room while a flashlight burns against your face, the suspect already discovered, the detective silent because he already knows.

The question irritated me precisely because it startled me.

Of course I’m self-aware, I thought.

I’m aware my nails are too long, my hair brown, my body small in stature. I’m aware these things exist. I’m aware of objects, of memory, of truth itself.

At least, that is what I told him.

But the longer I sat with the question, the more self-awareness became something terrifyingly two-directional. It was no longer only me observing the world; the world had begun observing me in return. The things I named seemed suddenly to name me back. The observer and the observed folded into one another until I could no longer tell which had arrived first.

I had not merely described these things.

I had become them.

The singularity hidden inside duality revealed itself slowly, almost religiously, buried beneath the hard architecture of facts. We call it “mind” because it is the closest agreement language can reach, but even the word mind leans toward logic, toward containment, toward the desperate human need to pin mystery to a wall and label it understood.

Yet the deeper self-awareness traveled into me, the more painful it became. Diseased with assumption. Heavy with conclusions. Every thought carrying the odor of judgment and categorization.

Then, quietly, something else began to emerge.

A loosening.

A state beyond rule-following, beyond containment, beyond the endless slicing of existence into opposites. Even duality itself—the ancient rhythm of inner and outer, self and other, back and forth—began to untether from anything I could confidently call real.

I could no longer find the edges.

Silence took hold of my unsteady feet as everything I thought I knew began to unravel. And yet I understood that duality would always return again, summoned by something as simple as a question.

“Are you self-aware?”

The world would reform itself around the asking. Names would return. Bodies would return. Identity, language, memory, judgment—all of it rushing back like tides reclaiming the shore.

But now I knew there was somewhere beyond it.

A landscape the known cannot enter and the seeing cannot see.

A place reached only by those willing to untether themselves from the madness of certainty, from the endless conclusions of the world, from the unbearable addiction to naming things real.

And in that place, awareness no longer belonged to me.

It simply was.