Vachon Imagined

Thousands of birds flew above her in the mountainous air, their wings cutting through the cold like fractures of light. Everything was so painfully alive she wanted the moment to split open and keep her there forever.

For one breath, she disappeared.

No past.
No abandonment.
No performance.
Only sky.
Only wind.
Only peace.

But as she descended, the world returned to collect her.

People.
Noise.
Selfishness.
Her selfishness.
The unbearable weight of being human settling back into her chest.

To carry something sacred inside an ordinary life felt unbearable sometimes. To glimpse eternity and still have to survive memory, heartbreak, and the endless repetition of self.

And somewhere between grief and exhaustion she finally asked honestly,

What is it that I’m fighting?

The answer came quietly.

Yourself.

Something inside her recoiled.

No, she thought. I’ve been fighting the people who left me. The people who took from me. The people who hurt me.

And the answer returned, almost tenderly.

And who taught you to leave yourself first?

Silence.

The mountain inside her shifted.

The man who abandoned you—
I brought him so you could see where you abandon yourself begging others to stay.

The man who took something sacred from you—
I brought him so you would stop attaching divinity to what could be lost.

I wanted you to know absence.
Not to destroy you.
To empty you.

Because only empty things can be filled differently.

And suddenly she understood.

Every heartbreak.
Every fear.
Every desperate attempt to be chosen, understood, protected—

it was resistance.

Resistance to pain.
Resistance to uncertainty.
Resistance to being human.

And the realization broke through her like light through cracked stone.

She wept then, not like someone collapsing, but like someone finally opening. And for the first time, she stopped fighting what she felt.

The abandonment.
The loneliness.
The unbearable need to be loved.

She let it touch her fully.

And when she stopped resisting it, the pain moved through her instead of living inside her.

Beneath it was something untouched.

Still.
Ancient.
Free.

And she understood then:

The birds were never showing her peace.

They were showing her what remained after the war ended.