"This one is for my friends who love a story without angst, for them who see nyongtory as an expression of love, of cuteness and giving. This is for my friends who always tell me to believe in both of them, in their strenght and their love. This is for Ti, this is for Leah, this is for Sonja, this is for Ayaa, this is for Izz, the ones who always hate my angst and still they keep reading. =) Love you girls." JessRa

 

My Butterfly 

-Based on GD's song: "Butterfly"

 

First Sighting

 

Within all the existent things in this world, there are those that stand out for its magnificence. Those addressed as beautiful things, truly beautiful things. They can rock the air around you, and their delicate features can make your fragile world shatter into pieces. But, behind those things, exist others that do not deserve to be seen. Terrible and grisly things, which stain the landscape with a type of grayish dust, blurring the vision and tarnishing one’s judgment. Those are the ones I had avoided to see and recognize since my childhood. I tried not to place my eyes over them, always pretending they did not exist. I loved my beautiful life and the world the way it was… perfect.

He was of those unwanted things: crawling over the dusty ground like a worm, trying hard to grab onto that little chance to become someone. He was overly petty and insignificant to be paid attention, so I turned my back and ignored him and his pleadings. Despicable things weren’t made for me to see. Only the sound of his footsteps behind my back, the flicking of a page or a sigh escaping through his lips were the evidence of his existence. He remained hidden in the shadows of disdain I had drawn over him. Meanwhile, my eyes were interested admiring all those wonderful pieces of life flying above me, guided by the wind and destiny. I stared at them with my oversized pride: “I have to possess them”, “They have to be mine” was what I always declared between my teeth.

I used to run to the point of almost tripping over the green grass and got a hold of as many beautiful butterflies as possible. They stayed there between my extended hands shining with bright and sickening colors, shapes and I always smiled in ecstasy ignorant of the saddened stares given to me from the ones around me. The shimmer in their eyes reflected what I did not want to accept: disappointment and worrisome. Their eyes could see what mine could not. They could see the fading colors in the beings between my hands, or how the lives of those once beautiful animals slipped slowly between my fingers. Once they stopped shining I lost interest in them, looked at them in frustration and discarded them with hate. They ended up dead and battered over the floor, dust consuming what was left of them.

I was a cruel human being: I used and battered people until a point where their souls stopped shining and I used and wasted opportunities to the point where they were far insurmountable. Dazzling smiles, pure shimmering eyes, their elegant flying; all of it I wanted to possess. I imprisoned them with my cruel hands and watched them die in unhappiness and desolation until they dried out of life from their wasted tears over their eyes. I stole the vitality from them and feed my greedy self with it.

You could see me running after each new brilliant color, each new arresting shape with the desire of finding a way to preserve its beauty once it was mine. An always-unsatisfied desire whatsoever. At the end I ended up watching them fly away from me, free and unimpeded, with true hate plastered over my frowned forehead. Why couldn’t they be mine? Why must they die once between my hands?

On that precise moment, a small hand my shoulder and a little human being smiled at me comforting.

“Love changes us, Jiyong,” he said, but I moved his hand away from my shoulder with a violent move and tightened my lips with fury; they were going to be mine in one way or another I promised to myself. And I left. Behind me, that insignificant human looked at me defeated.

 

Second Sighting

 

After some time, my eyes kept idolizing the beautiful souls around me completely puzzled. What made them so beautiful? I wanted my music, my appearance, my face and my own life to resemble and reproduce that kind of beauty. To imitate the dazzling fluttering of the wings of those butterflies. Sometimes I even wanted to become one of them and feel how it was to be one of those alluring beings.

I stopped hunting them and switched onto searching a way to opaque them with my own brightness. It wasn’t difficult. People around me seemed to be intimidated by my presence or my stubbornness, but they never pointed out my mistakes or opposed to my will. They merely lowered their gazes and nodded with their heads, allowing me to raise my voice over others, boost my laughter over the dignity of others. From time to time, when I glanced behind my back I saw him. His blackened face and outline. He was aloof from the world, insulating himself from the rest. Normally you could find him surrounded by an oppressing silence with his eyes wandering lost with evident shyness. His eyes stared scared at my aggressive presence rising in front of him.

Why wasn’t he aspiring to become beautiful? Why didn’t he laud beauty? He always stepped back when he was forced to answer a question as if he wanted to run away. And a strange curtain, one made by mysteries and silences, blinking eyes and stares lost in the emptiness, started wrapping around him.

Like a chrysalis, the curtain every day tangled up around him rougher, thicker until the day my eyes became incapable to outline nothing but a blurred profile of him. My hands started feeling a strange necessity to disentangle and tear those whitish strands that enveloped him, without success. He stopped shining, leaving my stubborn pride and myself alone.

It was a chrysalis made by fears, by judgments, by appointed mistakes. And I felt guilty. I felt as if my harsh words and my contempt had been the adhesive that kept those curtains taped around his body that now had imprisoned his soul.

I still observed the rest of the butterflies flying with their familiar elegance, but my eyes were stolen by nostalgia, and m