The Butterfly

"What a lovely morning," said the butterfly, awakening from her distant thunderstorm slumber. "I have had the most terrible dream, a dream in which I was a worm who inched through branches and along leaves." But upon seeing herself in the new light, the Butterfly began to grow worried, because the harder she looked and the harder she tried to imagine her wings were gone, the further they disappeared. She could not help it really, but stood in front of her mirror and tore the colours from her body with every word that she was speaking. "I am not the kind of creature they want," She would say or "How much can change in a night? When I slumbered last night it was as a caterpillar." The longer she stood there, the more the colours began to fade on her special wings and the more they began to shrink until at last they were a dull grey colour, and no bigger than either of her hands.


But she could not make them disappear, and the next mourning, when she awoke the wings were just as big as they had been the morning before. Leaving her house, the butterfly discovered very quickly that she was hated among all of the insects for her captivating beauty that all of the people she thought were companions, had a deep desire to tear the wings from her back.

While she was walking under a tree, a hornet sat on the branch and when she passed underneath, tightly gripped her wings and took off.
Looking down, however, the hornet saw that the wings were still attached to the caterpillar and around them lay 6 black bristle fibres he discovered to be his legs.

Before long, the insects had all discovered they could not tear the wings on the butterfly's back from her body, but the garden spider had an idea. He had seen what happened the day before and knew that the only way to make the Butterfly's wings go away would be to convince her they didn't belong on her.

The next morning, the butterfly's wings were even bigger and the dull black outline of such had been visited by some deity, who had graciously blessed it with new white and orange spots.
She was stunning!
Moving, though, for the first time that morning,
she discovered only contempt from her insect peers,
who laughed and mocked and sneered,
and tore the poor animal down to the level of worms. When the day had ended her wings were visible only to the gnats and her colour had given the black sky a vivid quality in light of its bright dullness (?).
She was once again a caterpillar,
but she is a butterfly.
You are a butterfly.
When the morning found her she woke up as a caterpillar and thought about building a cocoon out of makeup and sex, but it is that cocoon which changes the butterfly into the worm. She had told herself her beauty had been in the wings but as hard as she tried to remember what those glorious appendages felt like they would not reappear and her colour would not return. She spent nights trying to dream of the colours that were now utterly imperceivable to her during the day and upon waking discovered the colours which appeared so bright in her dreams had only been tones of grey.
She was now in a spiral, where every day meant a new sad high. Every day would bring a new standard of depression that the only plan the next day brought was to shatter the standard and replace with an even more inescapable anguish. One day, the depression became so great that happiness had seemed to die inside of her, instead of merely rolling and choking as it had been before. She lay on a piece of bark that had fallen off of a tree unto the flowers it lowered.
A bird which had been perched in the tree on a branch, flew down and grabbed the caterpillar between its beak. As it reascended and the piece of bark became a brown stain on the coloured background, she heard her skeleton crackling and was lost in the sadness of hope's final death. "You are the most delicious butterfly I have ever consumed," sad the bird with it's tongue.
And the butterfly was a butterfly,
and she knew it.
It was the happiest day of her life.