Vachon Imagined

There was a time when I thought friendship meant simply getting along—making each other happy, being polite, being nice. But that understanding began to fade when I also realized that friends can lie, gossip, betray, and hurt you.

The other side of the coin revealed itself during a painful period of my life. I began to question what I was allowing into my world, only to discover that I really have one true friend. She is the closest to me. She doesn’t always see things the way I do, but we make room for each other’s differences. We try to understand rather than judge, rather than punish. Even when I think about losing her—and one day I will, even if only through death—I imagine letting her go without resistance, without trying to hold on against what life will naturally do.

Friendship, to me now, is not the absence of conflict. It is what remains after conflict is met with honesty. Friends may misunderstand you or even wound you, but if there is love, there is also acknowledgment, apology, and a change in behavior. Without that, there is only performance.

Over the weekend I spent time with my nephew—easygoing, kind, full of laughter—who told me he has a ton of friends, and that they all make each other laugh. I was delighted for him. But privately I thought: if life were only that simple, we might never learn how to truly love, or how to choose what we will allow into our lives and what we will not.

Perhaps the deeper task is not to eliminate people or resist them, but to see them clearly. To live with others as they are, without trying to force them into something else. Not because everything is acceptable, but because even the difficult reflections belong to the same field of consciousness we do.