Vachon Imagined

Many years ago, I volunteered at a homeless shelter not far from my home. I was looking for ways to give back, but I think I was also looking for something else.

From as far back as I can remember, two things have fascinated me: people and photography.

Why?

Because through both, I could hear something that didn’t speak speaking back to me.

No one else seemed to hear it. At least, not in the way I did. It was something beneath what people said and something beyond what a photograph could capture. I was drawn to what existed underneath the obvious, the part of a person that revealed itself without necessarily being spoken.

I began learning more about people in some of the most unlikely places.

A homeless shelter was one of them.

There was one man who intrigued me more than anyone else. He always came in nicely dressed, and he claimed to have a home that he couldn’t get to. I never fully understood what that meant.

He would sit across from me while I was trying to register him and begin telling me about himself. He wanted me to understand his worth. He told me he had served in the military, which I believed, and I was astonished to learn how many veterans were experiencing homelessness.

Then there was the house he couldn’t get to.

That part was more difficult for me to understand.

But over time, it didn’t really matter.

I began looking forward to him coming in.

He would tell me stories. He would laugh. He never asked me for money or anything else. He asked for my time, and I had plenty of that to give.

I didn’t want to be alone with my time anyway.

So time with him became my muse. My Saturday morning routine. Something I looked forward to more than I realized.

His stories became familiar. His laughter became familiar. And without intending to, I became attached to this man.

Very simply.

Very easily.

I didn’t have to try. I just gave my time, invested my energy, and voila.

Attachment created.

Relationship made.

I was being given a one-way ticket into a world I still cannot leave.

That was nearly twenty years ago.

And in some ways, I’m still with him.

Eventually, he stopped coming to the shelter.

There was no long goodbye. No thank-you for my time. No explanation.

He simply vanished.

I missed him.

I had become attached to him, and I didn’t expect that attachment to matter as much as it did. I searched for him. I asked around. I tried to find out where he had gone, but no one seemed to know who I was talking about.

It was as though I had experienced some kind of aberration, some strange encounter that existed only in my memory.

But I knew I hadn’t imagined him.

I knew the conversations had happened.

I knew the laughter had happened.

I knew that, for a period of time, this man had become part of my life.

I was sad. If I’m honest, I was a little angry too. I had entered into a relationship with this man without ever expecting to, and then the relationship ended without giving me the closure I thought I needed.

But over time, I began to understand that what he taught me was far more valuable than any of our conversations.

He taught me that we are always in relationship.

We can’t escape it.

We are in relationship with the people we know, the people we don’t know, the places we enter, the stories we hear, the moments we almost overlook, and even the people who disappear from our lives without explanation.

We are in relationship with things we haven’t even met yet.

I didn’t have to work at creating that relationship with him. I didn’t have to define it or name it. I simply showed up, gave my time, listened, and allowed myself to be present.

And somehow, that was enough.

That is one of the things I have come to understand about attachment. We don’t always choose it consciously. Sometimes we simply invest our attention, our energy, our time, and our presence in another person.

And then something happens.

A relationship is made.

Some relationships last a lifetime.

Some last a Saturday morning.

Some stay long enough to change something inside us and then disappear.

That doesn’t make the relationship less real.

It means its significance isn’t necessarily measured by how long it lasted.

For a long time, I thought his disappearance meant something had been taken from me or maybe I had done or said something wrong.

Now I see it differently.

He left, but the relationship didn’t disappear.

It became something else.

A memory.

A lesson.

A reminder that people can enter our lives without asking permission and leave without explaining themselves, and still change us permanently.

We are always in relationship.

With people.

With places.

With memories.

With things we understand and things we don’t.

We are even in relationship with things we haven’t encountered yet.

And there is some comfort in knowing that.

We don’t always know what is coming.

We don’t always know who will arrive.

We don’t know what they will teach us or what part of us they will awaken.

But we can have faith that when we are ready, they will come home to us.

They always do.