Vachon Imagined

It was a word that related to “other” girls.

Not her.

Those other girls who didn’t drive nice cars, weren’t educated, lived in deprivation, always wanting more until desire alone became its own desire. And somewhere in that wanting, she lost trust.

Trust in herself.

Trust in her fellow man.

Fellow woman.

Here, it had no distinction. It was just life, life expressing itself through her, until one day this life took on another life, and all she could hear were the women before her:

“Don’t get pregnant. Don’t let them see.”

A word that was equated with murder itself; a word that carried the weight of being ostracized from a society that had stopped loving her years ago, and now, somehow, she was to serve them.

The contradiction felt wholly confusing, unacceptable.

They hated the rejection of life.

And yet they had taught her to reject it.

They had taught her that some lives were shameful, that some lives should be hidden, that some lives could make you less worthy in the eyes of the very people who claimed to protect life.

And still, she followed.

She followed the voices.

She followed the fear.

She kept following it home.

Their words carried hate and fear. They seeped into this life of hers and impurified it, and she had become it.

Now everything she heard was soiled by it.

Tainted.

Life, her life, had been tainted by them.

These women with modern-day torches hidden behind what they called good intentions.

Her own kind, she thought, turning on her.

Oh, the betrayal wasn’t anything she could bear.

So instead, she began listening to them more than the life inside of her.

The life revealed itself because of her choices. And in that moment, she was focused on pleasing him, not herself, not even her own body, which wanted to explode and did so on its own.

She didn’t need his help.

She never did.

But these women.

God, the women.

Shouting in her ear until their voices took over and she never listened to him.

It was his too.

And this never crossed her mind as he stood in silence, never wavering to tell her what he wanted. He never said it, but she could tell.

She became the torch that divided herself from him.

In pushing for her own voice, she denied his.

And then she denied the life inside of her.

I don’t want this.

“I” don’t want this.

The selfishness of another sort.

It stopped being about life and became about her.

Only her.

And she was blind.

Later, people applauded and bereaved her.

Hated her.

Tried to change her.

She grew silent, disgusted with herself and them, until them became the thing looking back at her.

And she couldn’t bear it.

Still, she kept returning to the life that said:

It’s okay.

It was all ordained by me.

The one you don’t understand.

The one you can’t know when you’re listening to them.

And as this life left her body, the man who had participated in helping her destroy it would no longer look at her when it was over.

She ran away in shame, still feeling this life inside her.

There was the dichotomy of no longer wanting, but wanting to feel it again.

When the life was growing inside her, she had craved Sprite. Now, every time she sees its emblem, she takes a quiet breath.

She remembers the women who punished her, the man who forsook her. As she becomes them, she remembers to make room for all of it.

Moving casually along with her friends, moving throughout her day with people who never knew, she smiles.

And she loves.

Even more.

Even still.