Arris puts her device down and looks at me. ‘Do you miss how we were in the beginning?’ I pause my game and hold her hand. We always will be what we were, I tell her. She shapes a doubtful sound in the back of her throat. ‘But don’t you miss the excitement? That new frisson feeling?’ I catch her eye and ask, Do you think the butterfly misses the caterpillar? Maybe the energy is different, but it was poured into forces necessary for flight. The excitement has changed, I say, but every day with you makes me soar.
Sharing space together but me separating myself by insecurities, an evolutionary vestige still clinging to my chrysalis. You know, it’s not always going to be sonnets and sunshine, I say. There might be times where it’s gloom too, and grey. Arris smiles with her eyes and opens her mouth wide, unleashing a kaleidoscope of butterflies. They flock around the room, flutter, flap, and fill every available space, countless wings in the colour of all things beating their response upon the stillness in the air, a chaotic order of magnitude. So, I say, it doesn’t matter? And the butterflies abate.
I watched a butterfly land on my dog’s asshole today. Hard to gauge a butterfly’s intention without degrees in chaos, but it seemed ambiguously direct and profoundly meaningful in an unsavoury flavour of mockery. It was a beautiful thing though, crimson red with flecks of yellow, broad-winged and poised. For all of their filigree the most beautiful part of a butterfly lies in potential stillness. I watched for as long as I could, still myself, on the cusp of some gross mystery, until my dog’s own tickling fascination grew and made its nature destroy nature, like an asshole.
A Few Short Words 