Vachon Imagined

“If I see You, do You see me?” she wondered, her eyes peering into a magnitude she could neither explain nor name. She could only offer herself to it, as though every question were a parallel journey, every answer an unfolding burdened by explanation, complication, and prose.

“If I see You, do You see me?” she asked again.

If I see You high upon the mountain, do You see me lowly in the valley, breaking open with every sunrise, every metaphor, every philosophy that has ever tried to hold what cannot be held?

If I see You, do You see me?

It was some kind of Hello God, it’s me, Margaret, every child ever born whispering into the unseen, hoping someone was listening, hoping the silence itself was an answer.

She wandered through shelves lined by librarians of curiosity, each book another invitation, another alphabet of life, another attempt to arrange the unarrangeable into words.

She ran her fingers across every binding.

The books slowly became immaterial.

She could no longer feel paper beneath her hand, only the movement of her own fingers gliding across every manuscript humanity had ever written, every question it had ever asked, every wonder it had ever dared to contemplate.

If I see You, do You see me?

Then, as quietly as the question had first arisen, another appeared.

What if every page had been asking the same thing?

What if every philosopher, every poet, every mystic, every child, every broken heart had been writing the same sentence in a thousand different languages?

If I saw You, even when my eyes were despondent and no longer awake, it is because You saw me before I ever saw You.