Vachon Imagined

The thought of him would enter her awareness, and she would feel it all over again, the compassion, the words filled with something she could not create for herself. It had to be him, she thought, lying in bed and craving one more kiss, one more experience of him.

Around him, she could be alive, empty, emboldened, sexually explosive. Something in her body seemed to wake in his presence before her mind could name it. Her breath changed. Her skin became suddenly conscious of itself. She noticed the warmth beneath her clothes, the quickening in her chest, the strange pull of her own body toward another body.

It frightened her a little, how physical it was.

She had spent so much of her life imagining herself from a distance, inhabiting her body almost as an observer. With him, there was no distance. She felt herself from the inside. She felt the weight of her limbs, the sensitivity of her skin, the involuntary rhythm and explosive nature of her own breathing. She felt desire not as an idea but as something that moved through her, something that altered her posture and made her want to be touched, held, wanted.

Fantasy could summon the possibility of it. She could construct entire worlds alone, make herself believe in them for an evening, even lose herself in the pleasure of imagining.

But fantasy could not give her his skin.

It could not give her the warmth of another person beside her, the pressure of his presence, the unmistakable reality of being physically seen and wanted. It could not reproduce the shock of discovering that her body could answer another person before she had decided what she felt.

With him, she discovered a version of herself she had never been able to reach alone.

He didn’t simply make her want him.

He made her aware that she could want.

That she could lose the parts of herself she had so desperately wanted to ignore.

And that awareness became its own kind of intoxication.

She was like an addict lost in her own appreciation of what it meant to feel alive.

Her friends would say, Not him.

Her parents would say, Why him?

And sometimes she wondered the same thing.

But at night, with the curtains drawn and the television playing one more episode of everything it had already shown her and wanted her to personify as something new, she thought of him, and an electricity moved through her body, a voltage of pure despair.

She could still feel the memory of him in places he had never touched simply because he had taught her to notice them.

And in the silence, in what felt like the most beautiful rapture, she would think:

It’s because of him I exist.

It’s because of him I am here.

Because without him, she would have to simply be.

And that was the thing she feared most, not losing him, but returning to herself without the intensity he brought with him. Without him, there was no longing to consume her, no anticipation, no ache that made her feel awake.

He had awakened something in her, and now she could not make herself go back to sleep.

He gave her something to feel.

And feeling was easier than being.

He was not necessarily enough. She knew that.

But he was better than boredom.

Better than the quiet.

Better than her tears.