Vachon Imagined

It started in my late teens.

The violence of self-flogging.

Literal violence. Not the kind you read about in books, not the kind wrapped in metaphor or borrowed from some stolen fantasy, painted across the pages of delayed imagination.

This was flesh.

A fist against a body.

Again.

And again.

And again.

There was nothing fantastical about it. Nothing romantic. Nothing distant enough to make it safe.

I watched my father hurt himself.

And I was his daughter.

Legend has it he would run down to the 7-Eleven at the bottom of the road, find a payphone, and call his father.

Come pick me up.

Another debacle. Another tragedy. Another saga.

And off his father would go, rescuing his only son from his latest catastrophe.

There was a self-inflicted knife wound to the stomach that would later look like jagged stitching across a story told to me not as violence, but as an “accident.”

What accident?

I would wonder.

What secret was about to be exposed to me now, shaped into another cataclysm, another version of the truth created around what was acceptable and what was a lie?

The wound was there.

The story was something else.

And I was left to live in the space between them, learning early that sometimes the truth is not what you are told.

Sometimes it is what your body already knows.

I remember looking at him.

And him looking at me.

Just a child.

He looked at me as though I could save him.

He would punch his own flesh, his fist landing against himself again and again, and I would watch, unable to understand how the person begging me to save him was also the person hurting himself.

I hate myself, he would say, boldly, like awaiting an award, some recognition of empathy, salvation, or hope.

That was the truth beneath everything.

I hate myself.

I reject myself.

I reject me.

I reject you.

The same thing with a different pronoun. A different look. A different hand.

One pointing at me.

The other slammed against himself like a wounded animal asking to be put out of his misery, or put back into his own depth.

His memory.

His life.

My life.

My brother’s life.

My father kept returning to the edge.

My brother followed him there.

But my brother completed what my father could not.

He completed the act.

And that is another kind of inheritance no child should ever have to carry.

Yet somehow, all of it lives in me still.

Sitting in the living room, he would look up at me, the smell of alcohol seeping into his clothes, radiating from his breath like a dragon’s fire overtaking the room.

It’s not there.

It’s here.

Here now, in this room where I am typing, the memory moving through my fingers like a staggering consciousness, like freedom searching for an open crevice, an open heart.

I accept my father.

Not his manhood. Not his place in my life. Not the things he did or failed to do.

Him.

I accept the violence.

I accept the boy who became the man who could not contain himself inside his own skin. I accept the fists against his flesh, the blood, the scars, the stories told afterward to make the unbearable acceptable.

I accept myself.

And in accepting him, I make enough room inside this endless body, inside this endless mind, to hold a life that, without its fervor and prose, is just a life.

Just a body.

No ornament.

No real name.

Just a body that will one day abandon me, and I will abandon it.

Maybe that is what I have been trying to understand all along: how much meaning we place upon these bodies, these names, these stories, these roles we are so certain make us who we are.

Father.

Daughter.

Brother.

Hero.

Victim.

Survivor.

We give them names and build entire worlds around them.

But beneath all of it is a body.

Breathing.

Hurting.

Wanting.

A body that arrives here and, eventually, leaves.

And somehow, knowing this does not make the life meaningless.

It makes it intimate.

It makes it ours.

So I look at my father now.

Not as the wound.

Not as the violence.

Not as the man I needed him to be.

I look at him as a body that was once a boy.

A boy in cowboy boots.

A boy before the lines closed in. Before the small barriers between language and people, between him and me, between him and the rest of the world.

And I look at myself.

The child who had no time to be a child.

The daughter who became the parent.

The girl who believed she could save him.

The woman who spent years carrying a memory that was never hers to carry alone.

I accept him.

And I accept myself.

Not because the story was beautiful.

Not because the violence was acceptable.

But because it was his life.

And it was mine.

And I am finally willing to let both exist without needing either one to become something else.

So let me stay here in the dark.

Let me sit with what was mine.

Let me stop trying to make it beautiful.

And let her pass the torch to the next one.

Let the broken know they do not have to become beautiful before they are worthy of God.

The presence of God was never meant only for the polished, the untouched, the acceptable.

It is here, too.

For the bruised.

For the broken.

For the ones who inherited wounds they did not create.

For the ones who carried what their parents could not.

For the ones who survived.

For the ones who did not.

For the ones covered in bruises.

For the ones covered in him.