Grave of the butterflies
As I was heading home from a very fulfilling day, my heart, full of joy, stopped to take a solitary moment. I sat down by the curb, thinking a million thoughts, gushing in like water down a fall, all involving the soft hands and clean demeanor of my ‘I-don’t-know-what-we-are-yet’.
The entire night I kept tossing and turning, hopelessly struggling to sleep. How could I have when my mind was flustered with thoughts of him, his eyes, his clavicle (it is strange, the things we admire in our lovers). I pondered about ‘foot fetish’ and other eccentricities!! The irregularity, the absurdity of liking and lusting over a body part. Now, I find it completely plausible to believe that I might have started admiring his feet. Or that mole on his cheek, which I did, astonishingly early in the relationship!
I will tell you more about him and the butterflies (literal), because the feeling is so trite, that it stands up to its meaning.
But it’s not time yet.
Anyway so the next morning, I rolled my windows up, to find two pigeons fluttering vehemently around their two freshly laid eggs, the water tumbler, turned down besides small branches- dry to the bone, withered in the harsh December winter. I could hear the faint voice of my professor teaching legal laws, but my eyes were on the eggs and my mind was racing a marathon of thoughts.
The sun was shining bright outside, and in the east, when the sun shines bright, it isn’t usually pleasant.
I wasn’t paying attention, again. But I never do. So my mind wandered the meadows and came home to a sweet lingering fresh morning memory of my workplace. Mondays were very blue but Friday afternoons shone a different light on the desktop. And the people. Ah! The people, a different lot, mingling to get tasks done, lunchroom smelling of gossip, and afternoons spent dissing about that one co-worker’s dress. I believe I am a horrible person and so it goes that she looked like a clown in a noir film.
I say she was uneven, like zig-zag, a mannequin in the back of a mall, lying unattended, with an ‘I love Britney’ T-shirt. After I blended into my new routine of school, the habit sort of faded away. But you always go to the beach, one last time before leaving. And so one afternoon I found myself preparing to call a cab to the office, ex-office, it is how you always mistake the year bygone with the one that you are living in.
The dry, winter air was fogged by a wisp of new development.
With a little bounce in my step and a mile-wide smile, I pushed open a door to the main office, only to find her, not at her seat. She had quit. Because she was expecting.
The pandemic indeed was going to be memorable to some in a lot of ways. Like me, meeting him. I am mumbling a Hailee Steinfeld song as I write and think of him. “Don’t need no butterflies when you give me the whole damn zoo”.
Anyway, so I had an eventful day chatting away with my soul sister. Her, a treat to sore eyes, music to my heart, dopamine in a packet. I started feeling homesick, hour after hour, as the day as remarkable as such, started fading, like sand trickling down in an hourglass.
The next day, I saw two butterflies, fluttering above my window. One of the pigeons swiftly moved and sat on its 2 eggs- white, and promising.
For as long as I can remember, I would wake up every day and let my mind wander in the moors, the flower fields, into his arms, although sometimes over a cemetery on a rainy night while my hands kept themselves busy filling a water tumbler for the new parents.
Although the nights were long and chilly, the days gleamed with hope. The hope of love, 2 new lives, a sapien, and a pigeon.
Digression but continuation
I am troubled. Since the time, I started writing this article which if my memory would suffice was 5 months ago, I’ve been through a lot of downs, the lowest, at the expense of it sounding ridiculously dramatic- has even pitted on the Tartarus.
Google it.
Anyway, if this piece wouldn’t have been my tryst with words and emotions, it definitely would have been an elegy. And I’ll tell you why.
The pigeon eggs never faced the warmth of the winter sun. The butterfly was never to be seen, and the baby died a premature death in her mother’s womb.
And as soon as I engrossed myself treading carelessly into what seemed like a garden full of lilies, it turned out to be a thick shroud of miasma.
Well, we never made it. All I have is a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, involuntarily reminding me of the butterflies bygone.
The butterflies are dead. And the window slab is empty, an occasional wind rushes through to soothe me as if it is too, mourning at the grave of the butterflies.
