Vachon Imagined

He said, “Trust me.”

She heard: give your life to me.

No thanks.

Fuck you—and the horse you rode in on—because my body is not signing up for your corporate-sponsored version of intimacy. Your “trust fall” doesn’t make me feel closer to you. It makes me feel like I should be wearing a red nose, trying to decide whether today’s performance requires the blue one instead, just to distract from whatever is booming inside my chest.

Fear? Maybe. Excitement? Maybe. Hard to tell the difference when your toes are dangling off the side of a cliff and some drill sergeant of a man is screaming, “Let go!”

God dammit—though even then, they couldn’t say God. It was always “God Bless America,” as if euphemism was part of the training. A place where even surrender had to be sanitized.

Letting go is easy, maybe, if you’re the kind of person who walks into Whole Foods and pays ten dollars for a can of red beans shipped from El Salvador like it’s a personality trait.

But for her, trust had a language before she was born—and she was never in the receiving line. She was in the other line. The one that already knew how to wait. The one that came standard with family systems that didn’t call it what it was. The only line open in 1975. Take a number. Wait your turn.

Letting go is everywhere.

It’s in the line where panic shows up because you’re late picking up your son and childcare starts charging by the minute and everyone tells you to “just breathe” like breath is currency.

It’s in every religion—hands lifted, eyes closed, asking for surrender like it’s a simple transaction.

It’s even in relationships, those unofficial institutions where everyone is walking in frantic circles trying to release something they were never taught how to hold safely in the first place.

And still—let go.

Let go.

And then, one day, she starts to understand it differently.

Not as erasure. Not as collapse. Not as becoming less of herself.

But as letting go of the versions of her that are always bracing.

The one that is scared before anything even happens.
The one that is angry because anger feels safer than softness.
The one that is nervous like it’s a second language.
And yes—the Whole Foods version of her too, the curated, over-functioning, “I’m fine, I’ve got this, I read the label” version that performs ease like it’s organic and locally sourced.

Letting go isn’t losing herself.

It’s loosening her grip on the parts of her that learned to survive first and live second.

And it has nothing to do with giving herself over to anyone.

Not him. Not love. Not language dressed up as command.

It is something quieter than that.

Something that happens inside her, for her, without witnesses.

A private unclenching.

A return.

Not to someone else’s hands—but to her own.