Vachon Imagined

“It is true for you,” she would say.

A carefully manicured therapist.
Patient. Composed.
Didn’t judge—at least not that I could detect.
Which, frankly, makes it worse.

Polite firmness. Clarity.
Never hostility.

A safe space disguised as a human being.

It wasn’t just a room for travelers popping in for coffee and mints—
though those mints, I’m still convinced, were forged in the upper chambers of heaven itself—
but love.

She was loving.

How did I know?

By the way she made me feel.

Which is always the problem, isn’t it?
Those pesky little feelings people try to put on a leash
like they’re badly trained dogs
instead of tiny creatures running the entire operating system.

Tiny mice on a wheel of creation.
A wheel of their own making.
Spinning.
Very committed.
Absolutely no awareness they could get off at any time.

Flustered, I would hear again:

“It is true for you.”

And I would think:
Oh no.
She’s got me.

I am now emotionally cornered by a woman with mints.

Do I fight back?
Do I declare intellectual war?
Do I stand up and say, “Actually, I reject reality—and your complimentary refreshments”?

Because part of me wanted to.

Part of me wanted to grab my feelings, storm out dramatically,
and declare everything fake on my way to freedom.

But instead—

Challenge accepted, I thought.

The same tone I had when my drill sergeant handed me a bayonet
and said: Now go.

On tires that had clearly lived three full lifetimes before meeting the collective emotional pressure of a thousand men on adrenaline.

The kind of force that feels like it runs on unlimited refills of testosterone
and absolutely no concern for collateral damage.

Now go, I thought.

If it’s true for me, then it’s true.

Simple. Clean. Terrifying.

But then something inconvenient started happening.

That “me” I was defending
began to… glitch.

Not dramatically.
Not all at once.

More like a software update I didn’t consent to.

Day by day.
Slowly.
In a time that felt longer than waiting for a sequel that may or may not ever come.

And then… worse.

I started noticing:
She wasn’t trapping me.
The room didn’t change.
The mints did not become less suspiciously divine.
Only I did.

And that was the problem.

Because if no one is fighting me,
then I can’t fight back.

And if I can’t fight back,
I have to finally sit in what’s actually here
without turning it into a performance or a defense or a story.

Which is deeply offensive, by the way.

But slowly, even that softened.

And what I thought was confrontation
was actually contact.

And what I thought was control
was actually fear of being seen without armor.

And the most inconvenient truth of all:

That part of me that needed to fight
ran out of things to fight against.

Which is a sentence I did not approve
but apparently life did anyway.