Vachon Imagined

Three times in her life, she experienced a complete and utter, electricity-running-through-her-body kind of joy: the day she learned she was pregnant, the day she learned her son had excelled at a task that had taken him years to achieve, and the day she earned her PhD.

Fifty-one years passed, and only three times—three times exactly—had she felt a joy so immense it could have lit her on fire and burned every imagined image to the ground. The ratio was bleak. Life did not promise ecstatic joy; it promised only the possibility of it.

And so her lifetime became measured in moments, not in haze. She captured every detail in her writing, learning to appreciate both the loss of time and the recovery of an illusion that, to her, was neither elusive nor false. It was simply the understanding that all things pass.

So when joy arrives—like a leaf falling from a tree and landing gently on your shoulder—you welcome it. You let yourself enjoy it fully, because it does not last long, if it ever comes again.