Vachon Imagined

She passed every sign as she struggled with depression and memories she could not exorcise on her own. Lightposts called out to passersby on the street. God loves you, they read, and she would think, Ah, that’s nice. That makes me feel good. Maybe she would go. Maybe she would finally feel this love everyone promised.

And she did, in pieces.

People bent over backwards to make sure she felt comfortable. They offered her a home, warm meals after church, cookies wrapped in napkins, patient smiles that asked for nothing in return. But none of it was everything. The signs, the food, the practiced kindness could not fix what was never broken in the first place.

What weighed on her most was not even the memories themselves, not the fractures of guilt constantly pawing at her mind, but the unbearable urge to go somewhere else, to become someone else. Everywhere she looked were projections of God, but it was not God she craved as much as the experience of love itself. And the more she watched people package God into slogans and acronyms — WWJD stitched onto bracelets, faith turned into merchandise and motivation — the more church began to resemble a business. Manifestation, salvation, healing: all of it sold with the same polished certainty.

And businesses do not care the way humans care. Businesses take human longing and turn it monstrous. Greed becomes virtue. Desire becomes doctrine. It never ends.

So she found herself drawn instead toward a quieter thing: a God with no personality at all. A presence that did not love her, did not hate her, did not give a shit about her depression. It simply was. Even that presence became memorialized eventually through images and rituals, things that worked for some people and failed completely for others.

So where, she wondered, was life before it became memorialized? Before it was branded, translated, worshipped, explained?

Little by little she distanced herself from people. Relationships became harder to maintain, mostly because she no longer knew whether connection was real or simply another performance people rehearsed to protect themselves from loneliness.

After years of practice — practice not in denying greed, but in refusing to answer to it — she began to see the world through herself. And through that world, she found another one inside her, a world that felt strangely free. Not loving in the marketed, addictive way people demanded love to be. Not binding. Not even caring.

Just being.

A life moving spontaneously, freely, with or without witness, with or without permission, with or without consent.