Vachon Imagined

The question that comes to mind is this: Why do you stay with people who hand you a life tainted by the soil they themselves have planted? Why do you stay?

Perhaps it is because you believe you are not enough, that you do not deserve an honest love, an unbetraying love.

Or perhaps it is simply the weight of time already spent, the effort already given. So you place the truth aside for another day, and another day always comes. It makes that promise to you: tomorrow.

Yet life has only ever made one promise: now.

The person who dismisses you, diminishes you, ignores you—why do you stay?

Do you hope they will change?

Hope, in these moments, is the fantasy that postpones living. It whispers that tomorrow will be different while asking you to abandon today.

The sky above you today is the same sky that stretched over yesterday and will stretch over tomorrow. Yet it is covered by clouds—clouds of memory, clouds of knowledge. Knowledge gathered through books. Knowledge gathered through experience. Beautiful as they may be, they can become veils over what is.

To lay them down, even for a moment, is to meet life as it is—not as you deny it, not as you postpone it, not as you imagine it might one day become.

If a person is disrespecting you, diminishing you, ignoring you, while still holding on to you, it has very little to do with you. You have become an idea they cling to, an image that allows them to avoid the truth of who they are—and, perhaps, the truth of who you are as well.

So why do you stay? she asks, her voice no longer defiled by force, only softened by simplicity.

Why do you stay when you are already greater than the story you tell yourself?

Why do you stay when you have always been more than enough?