Vachon Imagined

The day his heart turned cold, she had treated him as though he didn’t matter.

She passed him by, piercing him with strange looks of disgust. He felt every one.

She did not.

To her, it was simply herself.

And why couldn’t that be accepted?

Why couldn’t that be loved?

Each of them, her and him, riddled by the simple act of being themselves, brought their conflict and their heat into one another. And until that tension broke, there would be no healing on either side.

Two people touching the same existence, both wanting acceptance, but instead receiving resistance.

This stone couldn’t be mine, he thought.

And she screamed into the void:

It can’t be mine either.

One day became hundreds.

Hundreds became thousands.

And eventually, his heart was buried so deeply in cement that nothing, not her love, not her awakening, not even her apology, could undo it.

So he walked away, searching for greener pastures.

She remained in the field.

And there she cried.

Her tears fell onto the grass, turning every blade into stone.

But the tears were not for him alone.

They came from a memory that had nothing to do with him. Something that belonged to her. Something given to her long before she knew what it meant to carry it.

She stood there and wept with a perfectly intense rage, allowing the grief to move through her without asking where it came from or whom it belonged to.

Meanwhile, he settled into greener pastures of his own.

There were parties.

Noise.

Fun.

People everywhere.

The sheer companionship of happiness.

Except it wasn’t happiness.

It was fleeting.

A passing thing.

A brightness that disappeared as soon as he reached for it.

And so she remained in the field.

Waiting for him.

But not as she once had.

She began putting down every guard she had ever learned to carry against him, the same guards that, over time, had turned against herself.

Each tear became its own act of alchemy.

Each one softened something.

Each one dissolved another piece of stone.

Until one day, without warning, he looked around at the bottles of expensive liquor arranged among all the money, fame, and success he had gathered.

And he heard her again.

Thousands of miles apart, they were no closer than they had been in the darkness that had taken root inside both their hearts.

Her tears called him home.

And this time, nakedness was not exposure.

It was life.

It was prayer.

It was forgiveness.

It was rapture on the other side of conflict.

On the other side of finally having nothing left to hide.