Vachon Imagined

Her aches were muffled by the sound of her own voice, a voice no one could soothe, not even her. Every attempt she made only confused things further.

I know, she thought. When the memories come, I will disappear.

She would focus on other things, just as she had all those years when the people closest to her betrayed her in the most private and sacred way possible. And it didn’t stop there. No, she simply pretended.

This pretense became a kind of sacred prayer she repeated inside the muffling of chaos no one knew, but she knew it, even when she didn’t understand it.

No one wanted to hear it.

She didn’t want to know it.

So she wandered through life like a lost soul, drinking from garbage cans of yesterday’s vomit, swallowing yesterday’s sold remedies.

Know yourself, they said.

Sure thing, she thought. I’ll get right to that as soon as I can just be here. Solidly. Assuredly.

But how does one begin when everyone is searching for something?

A lover.

A goal.

A God.

Ah yes, that God.

The God who somehow hovered above her, keeping candy just out of reach, the way a man might lure his next lover with promises he never intends to keep.

No, thank you.

She had learned about that God in the pews of the righteous, among those who wouldn’t know silence if it shouted. How would they hear it anyway, when they were just as confused and lost as she was?

Everyone was muffled by the same mind, dividing itself into pieces, sorting what was acceptable and what was not. Fear had a way of turning judgment into certainty, and people were judged by this God written about in books, named in heavens, held like some scattered piece of stone carrying the secrets of the earth.

Meanwhile, she gripped tightly to her own.

Each one seeped from her skin like a chaos she couldn’t control, a mayhem she couldn’t tame.

So she kept returning to her own mind.

Again and again.

She believed it was the place that wounded her, yet somehow it was also the place she went searching for relief. It was where she found the endless stories, the memories, the fears, and the fragments of herself she thought she needed to repair.

But slowly, quietly, her mind began showing her something else.

It showed her the way back.

Back to the place that existed before the fantasy.

The dream before the fantasy.

The outline before the draft.

She had spent her life trying to create herself, trying to become someone worthy of love, someone safe enough to exist.

But she was never creating.

She was remembering.

Her mind had not been the enemy she believed it to be. It had not been the prison or the punishment. It had only been a bridge.

A bridge to the life that had been waiting for her on the other side.