It’s weird. Having to restrain myself from reaching out to you. Knowing that— were I to reach out— there would come nothing but a consuming silence. So many things— Stupid songs; Drag Race; Haribo— insist upon reminding me of you; it’s weird. I would say it feels strange, yet this feeling of echoing silence, of being shut out, is also too familiar. Strange things should not feel like family and old friends— like paths well-tread. Strange things are alien, and inconceivable, and novel. I have felt this before, and yet— nothing past or present can compare to the frenetic fluttering of my heartbeat (butterflies’ fragile, scaled wings) as you leant into me; nor, too, the fluttering of your own as my hand met its fleshy, hirsute cage.
What to do, when nothing feels real? We seal off these parts of ourselves, compartmentalizing and doubling as though things have not changed. Psyches split, self-dividing in schizoid-mitosis, and we dance about like paper dolls; marionettes with one-handed puppeteers, shambling and wiggling in our best approximations of normalcy, of healthy relationship dynamics.
I will never understand. You will never answer me. We will go on— demented and cavorting— repeating cycles of trauma responses and abuse. You will fall in love. He will be of the right and proper class; to your liking; someone you can proudly take home to the mother you hate. Someone in “the medical field”— a doctor, perhaps.
I will do my best for a man who leaves me devoid of any butterflies. I will eagerly await their return. Time will pass on— inexorable— and I will begin to doubt their very existence. I will forget the feeling of their wings beating themselves battered and scale-less against my delicate, sanguinous insides. I will assure myself that such things are to be relegated to children’s stories. No such thing exists. No chrysalid-memories. Metamorphosis in permanent suspension. Larval-stage mentality without the spark of latent potential.
Our best is all we can do. If the spark is to find us again, we can do nothing but wait— central nervous system devolving into a slurry of consciousness-goo, our carnal forms melting into imperceptible nothingness. If we are lucky enough to come out the other side, we will retain every memory despite a total obliteration and rearranging of neural pathways. We will remember the egg, the squirming infancy, the armor of second-nascence, the flourishing of our higher selves.
Maybe I will flutter again. Who’s to say. But, God be damned— I miss you.
