Vachon Imagined

She walks into the room, and he immediately knows.

He’s been told this is the feminine in him—the wise woman—and whoever told him deserves a medal for pointing out what seems obvious to everyone else.

But maybe it wasn’t obvious to him.

Not until her.

There was something about her he couldn’t quite describe, even through the best poetry—the kind that lifts us out of the mundane and takes us on a wild fantasy ride while somehow keeping our feet firmly planted on the ground.

Her.

The serendipity of her.

The rain suddenly sounding different.

The world somehow speaking in a language it hadn’t spoken before.

Her.

And then he gets to know her.

She snorts when she laughs.

Farts in her sleep.

Cries at sappy movies.

And when country music comes on, she lights up like the cowgirl everyone else wanted to tame.

Many men tried.

They failed miserably.

And the ones who couldn’t tame her walked away, calling her crazy, too much, difficult, maybe even aggressive—because something in her made them uncomfortable.

Something in him pulled toward her.

Something else wanted to run.

She didn’t meet the fantasy.

She was better.

She was human.

Just like him.

She farts in her sleep.

Burps at the wrong time.

Tells jokes nobody understands except herself.

And somehow, he loves that too.

Of course, there are moments when he wants to run.

Maybe sometimes he does.

Maybe he shuts her out.

Maybe he burns the pictures, deletes the messages, tells himself he’s finally done.

And still—

her.

Something remains.

Because she showed him something he couldn’t have seen by himself.

Himself.

Without the fantasy.

Without the performance.

Without all the fluff and noise.

That’s how you know he loves her.

Not because she completed some perfect picture in his mind.

But because being with her stripped the picture away.

She didn’t make him into someone else.

She revealed the man underneath everything he thought he had to be.

And perhaps that’s the secret:

Women were never meant to be tamed.

They were meant to be loved.

Not by a man trying to control them.

But by a man comfortable enough in himself to stand beside a woman who doesn’t need to be controlled.

A man who can meet her wildness without fearing his own.

A man who can look at her—farts, snorts, tears, country music and all, and say:

There you are.

And mean it.