Vachon Imagined

When love doesn’t look like what you expected, you can turn your back on it and call it evil.

A woman believes a man will never cheat on her.

And then he does.

People may say, “Cheating already happened,” but that doesn’t comfort the woman experiencing it.

She hurts.

Everything she thought, planned for, trusted, and built a life around has suddenly failed her. The future she imagined is gone, and the pain can feel unbearable.

Heartbreak is physical.

The body doesn’t know it’s supposed to be philosophical about it. It just hurts.

An image, a dream, has gone terribly wrong, and the pain is so great that she turns against the person who hurt her.

Then something else happens.

Instead of staying with the hurt, she creates a story.

He becomes the villain.

And we humans have an old favorite for pain:

Slander.

Gossip.

Tell somebody.

Tell everybody.

Make the story bigger, because somehow making the other person worse seems like it should make us feel better.

And for a moment, it does.

That moment can become a habit.

Then a lifetime.

Then an example for someone else.

Suddenly life isn’t moving anymore. We’ve turned it into a machine—solidified, categorized, named, and permanently assigned a role.

But underneath all of that, there is still a woman who was hurt.

Once.

Twice.

It doesn’t matter.

She hurt.

And instead of staying with the hurt, she abandoned herself inside the story about it.

The world has taught us how to do this.

Hurting?

Gossip.

Hurting?

Slander.

Hurting?

Find someone who will agree with you.

None of this makes her evil.

It makes her human.

And when someone sits beside her without feeding the story, something different becomes possible.

Not, “You shouldn’t hurt.”

Not, “It wasn’t that bad.”

But:

“I know it hurts.”

“Stay with it.”

“You can do this.”

“You are strong enough.”

“You are brave enough.”

“You are enough.”

Because love doesn’t disappear when someone hurts us.

It can become very difficult to recognize.

But the hurt is still life.

The person is still life.

And so are you.

The invitation isn’t to pretend the betrayal didn’t happen.

It is to experience what happened without abandoning yourself inside the story of it.

Because the story may change.

The pain will move.

Life will still be here.

I will still be here.