Vachon Imagined

When my husband and I were dating, we got into an argument on the phone.

He said something.

I laughed.

Not because it was funny.

Well…

Actually, yes. I was laughing at him.

Which probably did not put me in the running for Girlfriend of the Year.

But what he responded to wasn’t really the laugh.

It was the woman underneath it.

She knows.

She knows when she’s being mocked. She knows when she’s being accepted. And she doesn’t need your words, your suit, your title, your status, your carefully constructed little persona to tell her.

The life underneath you is always talking.

And my husband’s problem was that he could hear mine.

Unfortunately for him, at the time, mine sounded like a witch.

And not Glinda.

We’re talking green face.

Wicked Witch.

Halloween is brewing, my house is already brewing enough witches and sorcery to keep the neighbors nervous, and apparently I was adding the final ingredient.

I want you to imagine a witch.

It can be a good witch.

It can be a bad witch.

But here’s the strange thing:

The life she’s in doesn’t change.

We change the story.

We change the label.

We say good witch, bad witch, beautiful woman, dangerous woman, good man, bad man.

But the life underneath it remains.

That’s what I call God.

Everything else is what I call human.

We take one life and divide it into categories.

Gender.

Good.

Bad.

Beautiful.

Ugly.

Safe.

Dangerous.

But the woman isn’t outside the man.

And the man isn’t outside the woman.

The thing my husband was reacting to in me wasn’t something happening over there.

It was happening inside him too.

He just didn’t know it without me.

That’s the funny thing about another human being.

They can show you something about yourself that you cannot see yet, or alone.

My husband eventually learned that my witch laugh wasn’t the only thing I could sense.

I could tell when he was lying.

Afraid.

Angry.

Upset.

He could say, “I’m fine,” while his entire body was screaming, “I am absolutely not fine and I would like this conversation terminated immediately.”

And I knew.

Because the words are only part of the conversation.

The life underneath them is talking too.

Over time, he learned to hear it.

And I learned something too.

Fear, anger, laughter, desire—they can all move through us with the same strange electricity.

We call them different things because humans love a category.

But life doesn’t arrive labeled.

It simply moves.

And the witch, is simply the wisdom of knowing this.

She feels the life before she decides what it means.

She doesn’t have to make it good.

She doesn’t have to make it evil.

She can feel it.

Let it move.

Let it be purified before she turns it into the thing she uses to hurt someone else.

So yes, I laughed.

My husband heard a witch.

I heard myself laughing at my boyfriend.

And somewhere between the two of us, we eventually figured out that neither of us was being haunted.

We were meeting life.

The same life.

The one underneath the laugh.

Underneath the fear.

Underneath the man.

Underneath the woman.

Underneath all the names we give it.

That is the wisdom of the witch.

Life itself doesn’t change because we call it good or evil.

We do.

And God is simply the part we cannot divide.

We are walking in it, and everything else is what we do with it.