Vachon Imagined

She met him in a crowded room not unlike any other. It was as though he had appeared out of nowhere—the very thing she hadn’t expected, an affair she hadn’t planned. To be tested by her own desire was to be intoxicated by its cause, consumed by its own affair.

This, she thought, is where all things really occur. Then he arrives.

The things I dwell on, the emotions I deny or indulge too deeply—that is how he appears. That is how he is known.

The nervousness and anxiety she felt quickly turned to fire, an explosive need for him that no amount of him could ever quench, no language could adequately name. Today it was him; tomorrow it would be something else. But no matter how it arrived, it had already come.

What had begun as a passionate explosion between two people madly in love, within only a few weeks began to scatter like ants torn violently from their home, thrown into disarray without warning or permission. This was how she felt. Everything had been taken from her the moment she expressed her needs and he defended his own. Neither of them was really listening. Neither of them was truly present.

The more she reached for him, the more he withdrew. And she thought, Maybe the problem is me.

I’ll become more of this, less of that. I’ll sprinkle in some playfulness, some charm, and voilà—we’ll have a woman he desires.

But hope has a way of disguising itself as transformation. The harder she tried to become someone else, the more everything remained the same. She had been longing for a man who no longer existed anywhere except in her mind.

It never returned to what it had been, and she wasn’t sure she wanted it to.

Trust had been broken. Love had transformed from explosive longing into something that resembled hatred. This is what life does. It simply does. It asks no one’s permission. What rises must eventually fall.

She couldn’t change it, and neither could he.

Now, whenever she thinks of him—sometimes of yesterday, when everything felt effortless and delightful—she refuses to let herself fall. She refuses to believe.

She simply goes about her day, understanding, on some quiet level, that nothing ever truly dies. It only returns, waiting to see if she will choose it again, if she will give it her attention.