And Happiness Under Its Wings

Butterflies rest on the noses of little baby boys.

I knew a butterfly once. It flew up four floors up the office building where I worked, just to look inside the glass. It didn’t seem curious. It was not afraid of what it might see inside. Nothing was worth envying. Nothing inside was worth pause. But it did fly up, knowing nothing awaited it, and lazily floated by the glass occasionally. And I would see it. It was yellow.

How detached, the world of the butterfly. How beautifully removed from our order and our chaos. Our change. It doesn’t care about our silly little world. Our hard and cold buildings. Our fake plants. It doesn’t care about how many people were fed, or insulted, or murdered, or promoted. Why should it? It just is, and is happy to be. That other world, our world of becoming, is too harsh.

On the cool spring afternoons, often while I paused to speak to a friend, the butterfly would flutter by. It didn’t mean anything by it. Just delicately going about its business. It didn’t mean to interrupt. It wasn’t eavesdropping. And it wasn’t afraid of what it might hear. It didn’t care if it was being talked about. But it would cut between the two bodies of flesh and bone, because that was the way it wanted to go. And I would see it. And it was yellow.

Life was too delicate for it to waste time with trifles. Too delicate to fly faster or slower or any other speed than it absolutely felt like. Too fragile to build houses made from cards and comic books. I do not think it ever cared to own the world; I do not think it ever thought of that. And if the butterfly were to be asked, it might only point out that a world is far too easy a thing to break.

Or it might simply keep right on flying.

I wonder if I could hold a butterfly in my hand, what it might feel like. I wonder if I could let it sit in the cradle of my palm, and let its wingtips brush my fingers. Would it whisper the secrets of the universe to me? Tell me of how colours are simply sounds that we don’t have ears for... and how there never was a day and a night, a January or a July. I wonder if I could actually feel the laughter on its feet. If I concentrated hard enough, could I taste its lightlessness in my skin?

Or would it smell the weight of my world instead?

I never got to say hi to that yellow butterfly, but I think it knew. It noticed my wayward glances. Sometimes, I think that it lingered just long enough so that I could watch it. Its flight to my fourth floor was never a pilgrimage of pity, but I did welcome it. How stunning it seemed, to float there, between me and the rest of the world. The cars on the street zooming by could not compare to the brilliance of a butterfly.

I don’t think it ever begrudged me my attachment to a broken world, any more than it thought ill of the office building itself. How could it? I am what I am, and a world of pavement and success, of invented misery and magnificence, is what we are. That other world, a butterfly’s world of being, is too simple.

We were too far apart, that butterfly and me. But maybe it heard some colour of yesterday where our two worlds were not so different.

I was a boy once. And I met a yellow butterfly.