Vachon Imagined

How do I know he loves me?

I can’t tell you. I can’t even show you. You have to come to that knowing yourself.

But one of the ways I know is simple: I push, I prod, I provoke, I test the edges of things. And still, he stays.

There’s something to be said for that. Something quiet and unglamorous and deeply real about the person who remains when they know you still carry echoes of another love, and you know the same about them. Not a love that is neat or safe or particularly sane—but a love that refuses to disappear under pressure.

I can drive him absolutely mad. Sometimes I do it almost with a strange sense of pride, as if chaos were a purpose. And still, he stays.

We’ve had a child. We’ve lost a child. We’ve lost a career. We’ve stood in rooms where divorce felt like a word that had already entered the air, even if it hadn’t yet been spoken aloud.

And yet, when the dust settles—when nothing is being proven anymore, when there is no argument left to win—he will sometimes reach for my hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Those are the moments I remember.

Not what I imagined love would look like, but what it actually is when imagination is no longer in charge.

I thought I was marrying an idea.

But I received a life.

Not a perfect one. Not an easy one. But a real one. A life that stays. A life that returns. A life that, even after everything, still knows how to find my hand in the dark.