Vachon Imagined

When I was a child, I spent a lot of time alone. I felt like I was hiding inside everything happening in my family, my childhood, my experience. Being alone made me feel less divided, less confused, less watched. Solitude was my sanctuary.

In the summers, I would spend hours at the lake that sat right up against my grandparents’ property. They were at work during the day, and the world felt loosened then—children outside, hoses attached to house faucets, drinking without thinking, playing without translating every moment into danger. Nothing was wrong in those hours. Just me and the water of Lake Murray, South Carolina.

I would swim out and then down, letting the lake take me into its quieter places. At the bottom, I found things: shoes, broken objects, fragments of lives I didn’t know. I would pick them up, turn them in my hands underwater, feel their weight in a world where weight behaved differently.

And I would make stories for them.

A pair of shoes became a girl with a father who knew exactly what she liked. Not someone trying to buy her love, but someone who already had it and still wanted to give her something beautiful. His little princess.

I would stay there for hours, disappearing into those imagined lives. They were gentler than mine.

Mine was violent, confusing, hard to name without softening it.

There was a pattern to it that I did not have words for yet.

The same hands that held me could also make me afraid.

The same voice that called my name could shift in a way that made my body go still before I understood why.

And then, just as quickly, there would be something that looked like care again—small gestures, normal words, the return of what I had learned to recognize as love.

It kept me off balance in a way I didn’t know how to name. I did not separate it into parts then. It all arrived as one thing. Close and unsafe. Familiar and confusing. Comfort that did not stay in the body cleanly.

So love and harm arrived together, in the same rooms, in the same air, in the same hands moving through the same day.

Not as an idea.

As weather I lived inside.

I did not understand this then. I only learned how to adjust myself inside it—how to read tone, timing, silence. How to anticipate shifts before they happened.

It was not understanding.

It was adaptation.

And I would return to the lake carrying all of that without knowing I was carrying it.

Because down there, something changed.

I would swim into the deep and the world would quiet in a different way—not the quiet of waiting for something to shift, but the quiet of things no longer needing to shift at all.

And over time, the deep began to feel like something sacred to me.

Not because it was perfect, but because it was mine.

Up there, everything arrived already decided—what was good, what was bad, what I should feel, what I should ignore. But down in the water, nothing came with instructions. Nothing demanded to be kept. Nothing forced itself into meaning before I was ready to understand it.

The lake gave me a kind of quiet permission.

I could choose.

I could pick up an object, turn it slowly in my hands, and decide what it would be in my story. I could also leave it where I found it, untouched, disappearing back into the silt without consequence. Nothing punished me for either choice.

That was the part I did not have anywhere else.

The deep did not rush me.

It did not correct me.

It did not name me before I had time to know myself.

So I stayed there longer than I knew how to explain.

Not hiding exactly—something closer to being held. By water that did not ask me to become anything other than observant. By silence that did not break itself to fill me with someone else’s version of who I was.

And in that place, even what was broken did not feel final.

It could be looked at.

It could be released.

It could remain exactly where it was, without becoming a verdict.

Some things I picked up and held onto. I would study them slowly, as if they might tell me where they came from. And some things I let go immediately, because even then I could feel they were not meant to come up with me.

Nothing was explained down there. Nothing needed to be solved.

I would just look.

And sometimes that was enough—to see something clearly for a moment and then let it return to the bottom, where silence could keep it without needing to turn it into a story.

The surface world always wanted answers, names, reasons.

But in the lake, meaning didn’t announce itself. It arrived, stayed for a moment, and then drifted away again—like an object sinking back into water that had already decided how much it could hold.

I came to understand the difference.

How it felt to witness something without forcing it into conclusion. To let things be real without demanding they stay fixed. To hold something in attention and still allow it to leave.

Even now, I think in that language sometimes.

Of depth.

Of what can be carried.

Of what has to remain where it is.

There are days I can still feel it—the pull downward, the quiet, the strange safety of being under everything that expects something from me.

And I remember I wasn’t only surviving there.

I was becoming less divided.

Not through resolution, but through stillness.

Not by making everything make sense, but by learning what could be held without splitting me in two.

In that water, I wasn’t asked to choose between parts of myself.

I could simply exist as one thing—briefly, fully—before returning to the surface world that always wanted me more divided than I felt beneath it.

And that, more than anything, is what I still carry.