Vachon Imagined

They were fighting again.

She was enraged at him, her words coming fast and sharp, each one finding the softest place to land. She knew exactly where to cut. She could take an ordinary sentence and sharpen it until it became a blade, then turn it in him just to make sure he felt the wound.

She beat him down with words.

With vivid imaginings of everything he had done, everything he might do, everything she feared he was capable of doing. She built entire worlds inside her anger and dragged him through each one, making him pay for crimes he hadn’t committed and wounds he hadn’t made, because somewhere inside her, the punishment had already been written.

It had already been received and made into stone, made into him.

And he stood there taking it.

Or perhaps he was fighting back.

It hardly mattered.

She was fighting herself.

His anger showed her hers.

His possessiveness showed her hers.

His wanting showed her hers.

Even his tenderness frightened her because she knew that tenderness, too.

She wanted him happy, but she wanted him as hers, and hers alone. She wanted to hold onto him as though he were her safety, her only knight in a sea of sharks that were always out to get her with every word she spoke.

And that was the part she could not forgive.

Not him.

Herself.

Because he knew her before she knew herself.

No, sweetie. Not that one. Pick another word. I don’t like the way that one makes me feel.

Not that one.

That one exposes my hate.

That deep-seated resentment of you knowing me before I knew myself.

Before I knew that what I was giving you was myself.

It had very little to do with you, love.

You were the mirror to my own insanity, the one I couldn’t laugh at, so I shunned you. Tried to fix you. Tried to divide you into pieces I could understand.

But the prejudice had already formed.

Do not suffer the loss of a father who had abandoned me, as he abandoned himself.

No mother, father, God, or savior could heal that wound, could heal that void, or repair what had been broken, because she was still in herself, and herself now in him; each cutting into the other with a cake knife that looked like wedded bliss from the outside, but was hell from the inside.

And she tried.

Every day she tried to swim in shark-infested waters that aggravated her very sense of protection. She fought them off with both hands, covered her face, protected her dignity, her vanity, her existence.

She fought because fighting was what she knew.

She took the punches and gave them back.

Until finally, they won.

She gave up.

She had nothing left to give.

Nothing left to fight about.

So she sank into the abyss of her own depression, carrying inside her all the things she wanted to say but couldn’t.

So she spoke them silently inside her own heart.

God, please heal me.

Please take me.

And suddenly, she wasn’t just the person at the bottom of the ocean anymore.

She was the ocean.

And she disappeared.

Forever.

But something remained.

The knowing.

The part of her that had always been there before the instruction, before the shame, before the fight, before she learned to mistake protection for love and resistance for survival.

And when he appeared again, she began to see something different.

She no longer recognized only him.

She recognized herself.

The anger.

The possessiveness.

The wanting.

The fear.

The tenderness.

All of it.

She had spent so much of her life believing that what he showed her belonged to him, that she had forgotten how often it belonged to her first.

And so the next time he showed up, she didn’t reach for the blade.

She looked.

She listened.

She recognized.

It wasn’t him anymore.

It was her.

And she loved herself.

More.