Vachon Imagined

When a person enters your mind, they enter your body first.

It happens so quickly we miss it. But missing it doesn’t mean it isn’t alive. The body remembers before thought becomes story.

Life moves through sensation before it becomes memory. Only later does the mind turn it into image, narrative, identity.

The longer we live, the more these images accumulate. People are no longer only who they are now—they become layered with who they were inside us at different moments of time.

I remember my grandfather telling me he had memories of me.

He didn’t say much more, but I felt it in him. I felt the tenderness of being remembered as his little girl, before I had a will of my own, before I had begun to separate from him in the way all children eventually must.

His brown-eyed little girl who looked to him for strength, protection, affection, and presence.

But when he could not hold presence for what he did not want to hear, something fractured in the space between us. Something we could not return to in the same way again.

I missed that time.

He did too.

There was a kind of safety in being fully held inside someone else’s view of you. In that space, love feels simple. Direct. Uncomplicated.

But that safety cannot last.

As life develops, so does separation. You can no longer live inside someone else’s memory of you, and they can no longer remain fixed in yours.

What once felt like love begins to fracture under the weight of change.

I learned I could not rely on memory to hold anyone steady—not even the memory of love itself.

If I stayed there, I would begin living inside something that no longer existed.

And when memory becomes more real than the present, it begins to distort what is here.

What is no longer alive starts shaping what is.

This is how suffering deepens.

Not only through what happens, but through what we continue to carry without realizing it is no longer present.

At some point, I had to learn to rely on something deeper than memory.

Something that could hold even the instability of remembering.

Because the body does not only store tenderness.

It stores fear, loss, anger, disappearance.

And if we do not see this clearly, we begin to live inside those impressions as if they are happening now.

But what is alive in the body is not always true about the present.

It is what remains unprocessed. Unseen. Unreleased.

Life is always happening in you first.

Before story. Before interpretation. Before identity.

To find the truth, you have to tell the truth of what you feel, of what you see.

You have to stand within it, clearly and without movement.

Let it be there.

Let it pass through you as it is doing now, as it is always doing.

Do not interfere with it.

Do not turn it into a story too quickly.

Just remain with what is here.

Then something softens.

Not because life changes, but because your resistance to it does.

And in that softening, memory stops governing the present.

Life becomes what it always was—unfolding, immediate, alive.

It is a kind of dream.

And as time slows, we begin to move differently—more integrated into what is already alive.

Present. Unaffected. Not because it is separate from life, but because it no longer imagines itself apart from it.

It does not dream life.

It is life.