Vachon Imagined

She doesn’t break the law.

She follows it.

She doesn’t smoke.

She doesn’t have sex outside of marriage.

She doesn’t cross the street without her mother’s hand clinging to hers.

She does what she’s told.

She is the dutiful girl.

The good girl.

And she believes this is who she is.

Anyone who confronts that reality causes her to squirm in discomfort.

I am not that, she declares.

She cries.

She screams.

And people run to console her.

No, sweetie. You are not that.

And they rebuild the image she cannot hold herself.

For a while, it works.

But not forever.

The image becomes too heavy.

So she trades one religion for another.

She becomes an alcoholic.

Fuck those good-doers, she says.

And she breaks the law.

She does everything in opposition to it.

Someone says something—anything—and she immediately begins looking for the scapegoat.

The exit strategy.

I can’t be here.

Anywhere but here.

The good girl couldn’t be bad.

And the bad girl wanted to be anything but good.

Because both gave her certainty.

Until they didn’t.

Until she died a spiritual death.

And people said, She was the good girl gone bad.

Others said, Oh no, she was the bad girl gone good.

And either way, she was crucified.

It happened.

She saw it.

She even knew it because she was human.

And that was the beginning.

Because when every identity had finally failed her, she had nothing left to defend.

So, she walked in stillness.

And every time her body began to leave it, she remembered:

I am not my body.

I am not this world.

And the good girl had been searching for this all along.

Not permission to be bad.

Not permission to be good.

But freedom from having to be either.

The good girl and the bad girl were never two different people.

They were the same woman trying to find freedom through opposite doors.

One said:

Be good and you will be safe.

The other said:

Be bad and no one can control you.

Both were religions.

Both required certainty.

Both required her to believe that she could finally become something that would make her safe from life.

But life would not let her.

Because life does not ask us to become good.

And it does not ask us to become bad.

It asks us to become willing.

Willing to be here.

Willing to see what we are without running toward its opposite.

Willing to let the identity die without believing that we have died with it.

And this is what spiritual death really is.

Not the death of the person,

but the death of the person we thought we had to be.

And when that dies,

something else remains.

Not good.

Not bad.

Alive.