Vachon Imagined

There’s a man I would follow anywhere.

And no, it’s not my husband.

Before you block me on Instagram, delete my phone number, or brand me Scarlet—without the Johansson—bear with me.

One day, after watching YouTube videos of swing dancing, I decided I was going to try it. I went to one class, determined to make it count. I wanted to learn. I wanted to have fun like those girls in the videos were having.

You know the ones.

Flowing hair. Midriff tops that seemed to say, hands off, but you can look—just don’t touch.

The rules of society, plastered like a golden weight of despair onto a bunch of people who want to be touched but have forgotten how to receive it when it happens.

So there I was.

Just me.

And a bunch of extraordinarily talented and happy swingers of another sort, welcoming me into their little world like I had been wandering through a desert without food—or any idea where I had left my midriff top.

I was fully clothed, by the way. Head to toe. Dressed like I was preparing for the coldest winter of my life.

And I stood there like the fat kid in gym class wondering if anyone was going to move toward me and put me out of my misery.

The greetings lingered. People paired off. The party seemed to have been tipped off that I was coming, because somehow I was left without a partner.

Then one man took pity on me.

“Hey, do you want to be my partner?”

He looked at me with this calm, piercing gaze that immediately made me weak.

Like I had nothing to fight.

No midriff to compensate for my otherwise inadequate wardrobe.

No strategy.

He took my hand and began to shuffle his feet.

Slowly.

Melodically.

Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow.

But underneath it all was a movement that drew me in.

He wasn’t trying to make the dance happen.

He was in it.

It was moving through him.

Not the other way around.

I was looking at the floor, trying to tell my feet to move like his, and I would trip. I would wonder whether I had forgotten to brush my teeth. I would question every possible thing that might explain why this man had chosen me.

And he just stayed in the movement.

If the music went fast, he didn’t always go with it. He seemed to remain in some other kind of flow.

And I wanted to join him there.

There was no, “Hey, eyes up.”

No, “Come on, short legs.”

No attempt to convince me to trust him like the other men who said that and then led me into the forest and fed me to bears that hadn’t eaten since before President Trump started painting himself orange.

No, this was different.

He guided me without forcing me.

It was as if a voice had arrived through him to say, “Be strong enough to be gentle.”

And that was the thing.

There was no force.

And because there was no force, I wanted to follow.

Unlike the men who tell you, “Stop being so insecure,” as though they are trying to move a boulder through a typhoon, his spirit said everything that needed to be said.

I no longer felt like he was asking me to trust him.

He simply became trustworthy.

And somewhere in that movement, my insecurity began to melt.

The fear that I had chosen the wrong class.

The fear that I didn’t belong.

The fear that I wasn’t worthy of being there.

He reminded me what it felt like to live inside a flow I had forgotten—a flow of life that moves my feet, lets me panic, and then brings me back.

The flow is there regardless.

And I think that’s why I keep returning to the spirit of Jesus Christ.

Not because I am trying to follow a man.

But because I recognize something in the spirit he represented.

A man who knew division but remained in life.

A man who knew force, knew himself as force, and yet did not abandon life to become consumed by it.

That is the kind of man I would follow anywhere.

Not because he asks me to follow him.

Because his presence reminds me where I am.

This is what restoration looks like.

Not a woman following a man because she has lost herself.

But a woman following the life that a man has the courage to represent.

He doesn’t become her life.

He doesn’t possess it.

He doesn’t even give it to her.

He simply shows her the way back to it.

Through his presence.

Through his courage.

Through his willingness to remain in the flow when everything around him is trying to pull him out.

And when she finds that place again, she realizes something:

She wasn’t following him.

She was following herself home.