Vachon Imagined

The glass slipper. The romantic ending where the man chases after the girl. The quid pro quo of years of derelict attention suddenly arriving at full speed. The dramatic entrance every woman dreams of and the painfully devoted romantic every man hopes to be.

Until one day, the glass slipper of fantasy doesn’t quite fit the way she imagined.

And he can’t make it fit.

No matter his strength, endurance, or the thousand careful signals he sends, he cannot be the one who makes it all better. He cannot kiss the pain away. And if she is honest, every time he tried, she never quite knew how to receive it anyway.

Promises broke. Fantasies expired. The stories she had carried so faithfully finally ran their course and took a permanent leave of absence.

At first, she stopped relying on him.

Then she realized she couldn’t rely on herself either.

That kingdom was in disarray as well—thoughts moving through her mind with the temperature of a partly clouded day, forever threatening thunder. The certainty she once carried had worn thin. The old answers no longer answered.

And so she began, slowly, to surrender the fantasy for something far more lasting.

Not certainty.

Not rescue.

Not the promise that someone would finally arrive and make sense of everything.

Something quieter.

Something that remained even when the stories failed.

And it grew larger within her with every dowry she handed over, with every bargain she stopped making for security, with every promise she no longer demanded life keep. What began as loss revealed itself as space. What felt like surrender became freedom.

The less she asked the world to guarantee her happiness, the more she discovered a happiness that required no guarantee at all.

And in doing so, she became freer.

Freer to accept the glass slipper for what it was: a beautiful story, but only a story.

Freer to see him as he was, not as the hero tasked with saving her from herself.

Freer to give him the honor he deserved for trying so earnestly to appease a woman who could never be fully satisfied by another because what she was asking for had never belonged to another person to give.

The prince was never late.

The slipper was never broken.

And the kingdom beneath her feet had always been enough.

She had spent years trying to escape it, improve it, secure it, and save it.

Only to discover it had been carrying her the entire time.

And it had never been hers alone.