Vachon Imagined

When he said he was leaving me, it was a rainy day in December.

We had just returned from his family’s house, where his mother had cooked enough food to feed the entire block. I remember feeling strange, as I often do in crowds, so I slipped downstairs to be alone with my thoughts and that familiar feeling that something was off.

And it was.

Me.

I was off.

But I digress.

By then I had spent years pulling this thing called “me” tightly into my chest, trying to protect a girl who was terrified of abandonment. Don’t leave me alone with myself. Don’t leave me alone with my thoughts.

Ironically, myself was all I had when the wind turned against me.

Later that day, my boyfriend of two years drove me home and, without warning, told me he was leaving.

He said he didn’t understand me.

And just like that, the day ended with a bang.

A bang I had probably heard rumbling in the distance long before it arrived. We had always managed to patch things together before. We would fight, reconcile, promise to do better, and continue on as though the cracks weren’t widening beneath our feet.

But this time was different.

This time I found myself at his feet begging him to stay.

Please don’t leave.

I’ll do better.

I’ll change.

I remember believing, in that moment, that he carried my salvation and I carried my misery.

Looking back, I see how common that is. We hand other people the responsibility for our happiness, our worth, our peace, and our sense of being loved. We ask them to carry burdens they were never meant to hold. We expect them to heal wounds they did not create.

And they cannot.

Not because they are cruel.

Because they are human.

People, just like us, doing their best while carrying their own pain. And wounded people, however unintentionally, often wound other people.

I remember walking across the street toward my car, rain falling around me, asking myself the same question I had asked for years:

Why can’t I get this right?

Why does everyone leave me?

That question would carry me into an on-again, off-again relationship that lasted far longer than it should have. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether he loved me, or whether he loved what I gave him.

Then again, perhaps the more difficult question was whether I loved him, or whether I loved the experience of myself that he awakened in me.

There is a difference.

A profound difference.

Sometimes what we call love is actually attachment to a feeling, a reflection, a version of ourselves that comes alive in the presence of another person. We become addicted to the experience and mistake it for the person.

That craving can be blinding.

It can make us chase what hurts us.

It can make us ignore what is obvious.

It can pull us off center.

And if I’m honest, I’ve spent much of my life trying to find my balance after being knocked off center.

But perhaps that is what life does.

Perhaps life knocks us off balance so that we can learn the way home.

Not home as a place.

Home as a state of being.

A place within ourselves where there is no calamity, no desperation, no fear that someone else’s departure can take away what is essential.

A place where there is no “off” switch.

No final abandonment.

No scarcity.

A place where the well never runs dry.

And so we return there again and again.

Not for ourselves alone, but for others.

Because every person we meet is searching for that same well, whether they know it or not. Every person is searching for something steady beneath the changing tides of life.

The tides change.

Relationships begin and end.

People arrive and leave.

Feelings rise and fall.

But truth remains.

The heartbreak, the loss, the longing, and the confusion are not the truth itself. They are invitations. Temporary currents pulling us toward something deeper.

Toward the truth.

Toward the way.

Toward the life that has been waiting beneath all our searching from the very beginning.