Vachon Imagined

“God, it’s all in how it’s used,” she thought, reaching for the food she would binge on to calm the highs and soften the lows. An eating disorder had crept up on her the way someone sneaks up from behind and suddenly startles you. You turn around and wonder, How did I not see you sooner? How did something so small become something I could no longer carry?

The spiritualists would tell her to ask Archangel Michael to cut the cord. And she did. More than once. In fact, enough times that Michael was probably considering forwarding her calls. Each time, she swore she could feel the attachment loosen, could almost see it standing there before dissolving into the air.

The Buddhists would say, “Detach.”

A beautiful idea. Slightly more difficult when a glazed doughnut is already in your hand and another is whispering your name from the box.

The Christians would say, “Give it to Christ.”

As though Christ were standing on the curb with a reflective vest and a city-issued garbage truck, happily collecting everyone’s emotional trash before heading off to the next neighborhood.

Everyone had an answer. Everyone had a framework. Everyone had a language for desire.

And perhaps that was because all desire eventually points toward the same mystery.

God.

A word so powerful people have used it to liberate and condemn, to comfort and control, to justify love and justify war. The word itself wasn’t the problem. It was what people poured into it.

Much like a doughnut.

Or ten doughnuts.

Or twenty.

And yes, she once ate an entire box by herself. Not her proudest spiritual achievement, but certainly one of her most committed.

Eventually, she stopped trying to defeat every thought that entered her mind. She stopped treating desire like an enemy invasion. Instead, she watched it arrive. The craving. The longing. The need. The endless movement toward something.

She let the thinker pass through her.

She let the thought of the doughnut pass through her.

Sometimes she ate it. Sometimes she didn’t.

But she no longer believed her salvation depended on winning every battle.

She became comfortable with the rise and fall of desire, the endless tides of wanting and releasing. Desire, she realized, was not a flaw in the design. It was part of being human.

And perhaps, in some strange way, part of being divine as well.

The totality of every possibility.

The endless knowing of yourself.

The vast space where every hunger, every longing, every craving, and every prayer arises—not to be conquered, but to be understood.