Vachon Imagined

Before the light turns on, there is nothing here.

No one to speak of silence or peace, because even those are distinctions, already touched by memory, expectation, and feeling.

Then the light turns on.

Before thought begins reflecting reality back to itself, before the seer becomes the seen, there is only boundless openness—without language, without thought, without memory, without an “I.”

There is no you here.
No room to stand in.
No people moving about.

Only imagination will later create the idea of what this is, or what lies beyond.

Before the light turns on, we cannot know it, because there is no one yet to speak of it. The moment it is spoken, it has already become memory. The moment it is imagined, it has already become something other than itself.

And yet, somehow, we can return.

Not as a person returning to a place, but as the falling away of everything that was never there to begin with.

There is a quiet familiarity in this—not because it can be remembered, but because it precedes remembrance itself.

It is what remains before the world becomes something seen.
Before it becomes something spoken.
Before it becomes something imagined.

Before the light turns on.