Vachon Imagined

It started with a simple, almost dismissive sentence: “Don’t do that, child. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what you are doing. Here, let me show you.”

She learned the mechanics of things: how to dress, how to eat, how to speak, and the daringness of her inability to hand it all over like cattle supplied to an eager butcher. She maintained, even accidentally, that part of herself, her own soul, that lay deep within the religiosity of instruction, the place she would find again and swelter, not in intimidation, but in life.

A burning knowing: to know not only herself, for that was merely a figment of her own soiled imagination that dimmed the light beneath each page coming to life in the mystery. She would gouge her eyes out eagerly, peering into books, waiting with bated breath for each word and every page, searching for a knowledge already born with her.

Already unmistakably hers.

His.

Mine.

And somehow, she lost her soul.

She lost her very knowing of the flow that moved within her, within everything.

“I told you so. Don’t do that.”

It turned into: Don’t wear that. Don’t say that. Don’t look at him. Don’t be alive.

And so she tried to pretend he wasn’t good-looking, as his eyes tilted toward her, piercing with jealousy over the history, the pages he, too, carried, the pages of indecency that told him what was allowed and what wasn’t.

He followed the rulebook, but it still didn’t grant him immunity from the tide of denial or the tide of his own lust.

“Look at her,” he would say, tidying her hair into her collar as though she had just exposed the disease of every soil, the fabrication of every story lying deep within her that said, I’m not wrong. I’m not guilty. Please don’t punish me.

When it’s you who needs to fear.

That daunting cry for someone to love you—

It wasn’t me.

It wasn’t my tightly braided, interwoven hair.

The man you’re scared of hurting me is you.

As she mocked the fabric of religiosity and deniability, underneath the cloth of propriety was lust, not for her, but for him.

To feel the ignition of what she revealed in him.

To practice discipline when touching her.

Gentleness when speaking to her.

And that opened the port of denial so widely that he couldn’t escape his own voice returning to him:

Look what you’ve done. Look what you’ve created.

But still, in the gentle siren of everything she was punished for not being, she comforted him.

She remained by him as he wept into the hands of those he had hurt, trying to protect himself.

She remained by him.

And she comforted him.