Vachon Imagined

It was an almost.

A could-have-been.

A phantom that still crosses my mind as I drive down the road, imagining the light spilling over us, skin to skin—the moments we all long for until life reminds us how easily they vanish. A missed breath. A passing glance. A life that chooses another direction.

And I am returned once again to the quiet reality that says:

You’re not here.

Perhaps you never really were.

Another lifetime drifts past me, reminding me that I wanted you only to never have you. Again and again, the years dissolve into something that no longer measure themselves by calendars. Twenty years, maybe more, since I felt that electric silence between us—that rare recognition that seemed to belong less to this world than to another.

In my mind, we exist beyond language.

There are no explanations there. No conversations that finally make sense of everything. Just an atmosphere where words have become unnecessary, where presence itself is the language, and we are suspended inside it.

Biscuit, I called you.

Such a ridiculous little name.

A term of endearment for time never spent. For conversations never recorded. For a history that exists almost entirely in longing. Strange how affection can become so real when so little else does.

Then I lost you.

An immeasurable guilt settled over me, one that no amount of self-castigation could ever justify. I punished myself for your absence as though grief had direction, as though pain always required someone to blame.

I made that someone me.

I took on the weight of an entire world because that’s what I had always done. I trouble the unsuspecting. I punish the willing. I mistake suffering for responsibility and call it love.

As I begged you to stay, clinging to every metaphorical and material thread I could find, I made a fool of myself.

And you were there.

Somewhere in that space between presence and distance, I felt myself exposed in a way I didn’t yet understand how to hold.

I looked up at the full moon and wondered if you were looking too.

I imagined you laughing—not as fact, but as feeling, as interpretation, as the shape my pain gave to silence when it had nowhere else to go.

I kept reaching anyway.

Undressing the truth of myself in front of you, over and over, hoping that honesty would create closeness instead of distance.

But it didn’t.

And whether you turned away because you were afraid, or overwhelmed, or simply not able to stay with what was being offered—I may never know.

What I do know is this:

I gave more than I understood I was giving.

And I mistook that giving for something that could be returned in the same language.

I reached farther than my dignity could carry me, believing that if I loved harder, explained myself better, or held on long enough, you might choose differently.

You didn’t.

You moved forward, and I was left inside the echo of a decision I could not follow.

Questions remained, but they had nowhere to land.

Why did it end this way?

Why that silence?

Why does something so alive in me feel like something that never fully happened?

Perhaps the light between us was simply too bright. There was something sacred in those moments—something that revealed itself only when we were stripped of everything but presence, skin to skin, without performance or pretense.

Not everyone stays when that kind of truth appears.

So you disappeared.

Reality returned, but not all at once.

You still drift through my thoughts in the most unexpected and inconvenient ways. A familiar stretch of road. A certain quality of afternoon light. A song I wasn’t prepared to hear.

That resistance remains, held in bondage by all the rules we’ve inherited:

Don’t think about this.

Don’t go back there.

Move on.

Yet there you sit, quietly in the back of my mind.

Patient.

Unmoved.

Mocking every rule that tells me memory should behave. Mocking me for believing that longing ever obeyed reason.

I try to resist your name as though it were an unwanted frequency breaking through static.

Did I ever truly know your name?

Or did I make it up altogether?

Every February 13th I wonder if I’ve remembered it correctly.

I imagine blowing out candles alone for a birthday you may never have celebrated, honoring a life that may never have belonged to you at all.

Memory is cruel that way.

It asks for devotion but offers no proof.

Sometimes I wonder…

Do you think of me?

Do you ever return to that same impossible moment? The one that never truly belonged to us, yet somehow never left either?

Or have I been carrying this phantom alone—

holding on to a life that existed only long enough to leave its echo?

I yearned then.

I yearn still.

And I hate you for that.

I hate myself even more.

I hate that longing has outlived reason. That it has ignored time, resisted forgetting, and quietly defied every version of me that promised we were finally finished.

It lingers.

Not because I ask it to.

Not because I welcome it.

But because some part of me still remembers a life that never happened.

Perhaps that is the cruelest part.

Not losing you.

But never quite losing the possibility of you.

Never quite losing the memory of you.