Vachon Imagined

With every man and every thing that hurt her, she blocked phone numbers, cast them out the way a preacher might cast out a demon.

Ah, yes. There. That’s over.

But the spirit of life, the spirit of ourselves, is not that clean, despite our wanting it to be.

Pain remains.

And without stillness, it takes over. It hardens into an identity. It becomes the story we tell ourselves about who we are, much like the first time she spoke your name, or the first time he looked you in the eye with an effervescence that set you on fire, set you ablaze. A fleeting moment, yet one that felt eternal. A brief encounter with the knowing of life itself.

Life arrives in all forms.

We do not erase it. We learn to move with it. We learn to work with it as it comes, passes through, and changes shape. Joy, grief, longing, heartbreak, wonder—they are visitors, not permanent residents.

But when people become lost inside any one of them, that is where God seems to disappear. Not because God has gone anywhere, but because we have mistaken the passing current for the entire ocean.

And so we wonder why our efforts are not enough. Why the blocking, the running, the fixing, the forgetting never quite bring us peace.

Because every effort, even the ones born from pain, is searching for the same thing: an exit ramp toward a love that never ends, never ceases, never asks life to be anything other than what it is.