Vachon Imagined

She remembers.

She remembers the fancy tables she used to dream of sitting at.
Important people.
An important version of herself.

Let her forget the life that left her abandoned.
Let her forget the man who caused it.
Let her forget.

It becomes a kind of battle cry.

A forgetting that feels like survival.

And beneath it—something older.

A stolen land still speaking underneath thought.
The quiet urge of people beneath it reaching back toward life.
Toward ancestry.
Asking, without words, to be seen through the wall of separation.

But no one listens to the wall.
No one listens to the ground.

She is too busy thinking of folded napkins.
Cutlery arranged like meaning.
Images held in a mind trying to forget that it is mind.

And yet—even this does not make sense in logic.
And still, it is what most people do.

They forget life.
They forget themselves.
They forget the life that made them.
The ancestry that continues beneath them.

But she does not only forget.

She notices.

She notices the way she forgets.
And she notices the way she remembers.

And in that noticing, something softens.

Not resolution.
Not clarity.

But presence.