Vachon Imagined

It was told to her a thousand different ways from the day she was born.

Not with words, necessarily. People imagine truth arrives in grand speeches, but often it arrives through slammed doors, long silences, and the strange feeling that something is wrong even when everyone at the dinner table is pretending it isn’t.

She was a powerless child brought into a home where people were ruled by their desires. Their desire to be loved. Their desire to be accepted. Desires so desperate and unexamined that they became abuse, denial, and a thousand ways of teaching a child that her truth was inconvenient.

The lesson was simple: don’t say it.

Don’t talk about it.

Don’t make anyone uncomfortable.

Because what might it cost? Love? Approval? Belonging?

Not that she had much of those things to begin with.

So she found companionship elsewhere.

Nature, it turned out, was an excellent listener.

The frogs behind her grandmother’s house never interrupted. They never changed the subject. They never suggested she “focus on the positive.” They simply sat in the darkness making frog noises as if they had nowhere else to be and nothing more important to do.

As a child, she admired that.

There was something comforting about creatures who seemed completely unconcerned with pretending.

The frogs were frogs.

The trees were trees.

The sky was the sky.

Only humans seemed exhausted by the burden of being themselves.

Eventually, she told people what had happened.

And to her surprise, the world did not stop spinning.

Instead, someone said, “Let’s have dinner.”

As though unbearable pain were a plate of broccoli that could simply be moved to the other side of the table.

The trouble with suffering is that it doesn’t work that way.

A child who learns the world is unsafe doesn’t leave that lesson behind when the danger passes. The body remembers. The mind remembers. Long after the war is over, the soldier remains on duty.

Safety becomes something to construct rather than something to feel.

So she spent much of her life protecting others.

Making sure no one felt as powerless as she once had.

Which is a beautiful thing, although not always an effective one.

You can help people.

You can love people.

You can stand beside them in the dark.

But you cannot heal their lives for them any more than someone can do your push-ups and expect you to get stronger.

Each person eventually has to pick up their own life and carry it.

She became a warrior in the most literal sense. She joined the Army. She entered law enforcement. She confronted danger, criminals, and the many varieties of human chaos that seem determined to keep employment opportunities available for police officers.

Yet beneath all of that was something she still feared.

Not evil.

Herself.

And when she finally brought that fear into the light, she discovered something astonishing.

What she had called evil was never evil at all.

It was grief.

It was loneliness.

It was fear.

It was a child who had survived.

And beyond all of that, beyond time and memory and the opinions of other people, there remained a quiet space.

A space the frogs had known about all along.

A place where nothing needed to be earned.

A place where she was not broken, not abandoned, not forgotten.

Simply alive.

Simply protected.

Simply loved.

The frogs, in their own strange and amphibious way, had been trying to tell her that for years.