Vachon Imagined

The phone number—just digits on a piece of paper at first—would later come alive through nightly conversations. The kind where two people become giddy at the sight of each other’s names appearing, not only in their contacts, but glowing on the receiving end of a call. His name lit up my phone like Christmas lights, and with every ring came exploration, adoration, the slow unfolding of another person. It felt like moonlight entering my existence the way the sun reflects itself back through softer things.

It’s me who loves orchids. Me who lingers in the scent of lemongrass, gardenia, vanilla. Me who knows the lyrics to almost every Wu-Tang song because they tell stories that can assault the ears and still seduce curiosity. Lives unlike mine, yet painfully familiar in their broken promises, fractured visions, expectations, and desire. The kind of stories where you never quite know whether the walls around someone exist to protect them or imprison them.

And me—the woman who likes to be made love to long before the act itself. Not through performance or introduction, but through a kind of foreplay that reaches inward first. Through conversation that lingers. Through attention that listens carefully enough to remember. Through small acts of kindness witnessed the way fireworks split open the Fourth of July sky—sudden, bright, impossible to ignore. Rich in their intention. Impactful in their honesty.

As the phone rang more often, the clear air between us slowly eroded beneath expectation. No longer was she simply free to exist inside an open forum of adoration. He loved everything about her, even while struggling to contain his hunger for her honesty—the way she strung words together until they labored his consciousness and bent his reality toward her.

Still, it felt good getting to know me more. Better, even, getting to know his silences.

Not the kind that feel empty, but the kind that begin to speak when you stay inside them long enough. I learned that I could be known there, too—not only in his attention, but in what he couldn’t sustain. In the pauses between his reaching. In the spaces where presence should have been but wasn’t.

There is a way someone’s absence becomes its own language. His lack of endurance. His inability to stay inside the moment he had helped create. It didn’t arrive all at once—it revealed itself slowly, like something unraveling at the edges.

And still, I listened.

I listened the way you listen when you are trying to understand whether you are being held or simply held at the edge of someone’s capacity. I learned the rhythm of his returning and retreating. The way he could touch something tender and then step back from it as if it asked too much of him to remain.

In those silences, I began to recognize myself differently. Not as someone waiting to be completed, but as someone who could exist fully even when not fully received. Even when the conversation stopped. Even when his presence thinned into something I had to imagine rather than hold.

And strangely, I was still there. Still becoming. Still learning what it meant to be known not only through his attention, but through the shape of what he could not sustain.