Drawing butterflies

When all you have is a pencil and a sick heart, you start to draw butterflies.

      Once I heard a story. I don't quite remember names or details about its characters, but in my memory it's still craved the ending. Butterflies. A story about butterflies dancing in the air and spreading soft dust from their fragile wings upon the world, mesmerizing everyone's sight and taking their imagination in a journey through skies and stars. 

And so it begun. With butterflies painted on my blue walls; delicate, childishly drawn butterflies which greeted me with their unsure contours every morning. Then Nana, the woman I keep in heart as the primordial motherly figure, telling me to be prepared for school. The driver, the paved road which lead to massive, iron confectioned gates, then the school, with its modests paths and gates. The murmur of the crowd and the partly known faces. 

This is all I can recall from my childhood, before that to happen. I think I was around 10 when a doctor with a stern figure and a composed aura told my mother my heart was sick. From that point I haven't ever seen the gates of the school nor have I heard the piercing voices of my colleagues in the morning. I remained encaged in my own house, with people measuring my breaths and counting the sips of water I was drinking. My parents proclaimed for themselves that my body is weak and too exhausted to normally functionate. Of course that was only a subterfuge for them to make easier the news of my condition. In reality, I was craving to evade from that world which seemed fade and dull; too ternish for me to feel like I belong to it. When the moon was climbing silently and gracefully on the cupole of the night sky, where stars where haphazardly thrown, I was up in my bed, chest moving chaotically as the air inhaled penetrated my very soul. I was opening the window, finding a good spot on the floor and, with shaky hands and subtle grins dancing at the corner of my lips, I was drawing, fingers following the yells of my sick heart and mind ravashed by the fury I was feeling deep inside my chest, rising and growling at the beautiful, pale moon which was embracing me with her livid arms formed from trembling rays of light. 

I made it every night; or, at least, this is how I remember things. There wasn't any feeling more intense than sensing the rough paper sliding beneath my fingers and I couldn't imagine a more breathtaking picture than the one of my newly drawn butterflies. The next day, I was organizing my drawings; blue, green, circle shaped wings, unfinished, uncategorized etc. I've built a proper system, an entire portfolio. Sometimes I was imagining people gazing at my art and humming words of appreciation; and in those moments, I was feeling my heart clutched in a misterious grip, drapes of shivers marching along my spine as the possibility of exposing my butterflies, of making them live and letting them fly to the azure sky was forming in my head. But then it came the winter and opening the window in the middle of the night would have drawn the attention of my guardians. However, I had found another way of filling my heart with flight and its garce. Snowflakes; big snowflakes which were hurtfully separating from the big, puffy clouds which were covering the black mantal the sky was wrapped in. They were floating like lost butterflies in the air, describing semi-circles, drawing unknown, secret shapes through the ether and then they were landing with soft, imperceptible, silent thumps on the snow carpet, merging into other pieces of ice, melting their unique form into the white veil which, eventually, would meet someone's shoes. Their fate seemed cruel to me; I had to understand that not butterflies were my real brothers, but snowflakes; forever lost and searching for their road, forever encaged in the carpet of snow as they settled their moves, forever not belonging to anything else than air and dreams. 

I was like them as well, but dreamt of becoming a butterfly. A butterfly which could fight against the wind, pass through storms, leave the ground with grace and surrender to the blue of the sky. I dreamt to be a butterfly... But I had a sick heart and any great effort or quicker pulse could have sent me in the arms of the death. 

And so appeared the urge. I was, I think, 14 when I firstly thought about it. I was wasting time by reading some magazines, when I saw an article about a show with military planes. I stared at the picture of those beautiful machines cutting the white, cotton like clouds and, for a second, I forgot to breath. That was my chance to become a butterfly, to abandon myself to the infinity of the sky and to feel the adrenaline coursing through my weakened veins. I started to inform myself about pilots; that was the moment when I realised dreams are the easier to break things in the world. Somewhere, in a small guide was stipulating that for being a pilot, you need a perfect heart. My heart was far from perfect; but was full of hopes and the air of success. I've thought a long time what to do, how to manage the situation for me to be able to fly in an airplane. My parents had a lot of influential friends, but they couldn't for anything in the world, agree with my idea, once knowing the risks the flight was implying. Nobody in their right mind wouldn't ever think of doing something like this with a sick heart; but I was desiring it more than anything; I could have given my life for having this chance. 

Many years, I've kept the article from that magazine, somehere between my drawings. I know it was placed between purple and uncategorized categories. But I, somehow, abandoned easily that dream, with some tears and a hurt heart. My parents died, mom first, then dad, my dear Nana left my side; I was all alone in my manor, with no interest or acquaintances apart from those acquired from charitable actions. I've had a boring life, after all, taking my parents's mania of moving too sudden or breathing too deep; I've inherited their fear of me breaking to pieces right in front of them. But they no longer existed. 

I found my drawings in a lazy afternoon in a winter day. In the background the murmur of the burning woods from the fireplace was accompanying me and a distant jazz song harmoniously was arriving to me from time to time. When I firstly saw my drawings, I was confused; I was holding memory of someone, sometime throwing them. But they were there, in front of me; unrefined lines on white paper. Thousand of butterflies; small, grand, blue, purple, green, yellow, a whole pallette of butterflies; flying or landing on flower petals; with their wings widely spread or tightly closed; butterflies. And then, at the intersection of purple and uncategorized categories I've found the article. My heart started to pound against my tightening chest as a delighted smile was curling my lips gratiously. I had to make it. 

I remember that with a night before the flight I did barely sleep, fidgeting in the bed with the thought of the great machine which would send me right into the heart of the sky and would make me fulfill my dream. The next morning, I was up early, clothed myself properly and went to the military base where existed as well an airport. I greeted anyone with a smile, I shook people's hands, addressed my salutes to the ones in charge of my flight. And then it was my first encounter with the plane. And it was beautiful. Like a steel bird, with an aerodynamic shape and an elegant, slim frame. It was stunning and I think that for the first time in my life I had the chance to fall in love at the very first sight. 

A step, two steps, sitting, inhaling profusely; I felt the nervousness twirling my insides and my heart thumping loudly against my ribcage. I was petrified. Feeling the gentle murmur of the plane beneath me, the exquisite sensation of parting from the ground, every beat of my heart; my mind was blank by the time we were going higher and higher. And all I could do was to smile. I closed my eyes, deeply inhaled, hold the air in my lungs, then exhaled and gazed at the white clouds which seemed to clutch me in their puffy arms. I gasped as realising how blue could be the sky and even reached one hand, in the endeavour of catching it. But my fingers hit the window and I retreated my limb, resuming my staring. I could see a flock of birds beneath us, their elegant wings making dance like moves, I could almost smell the rain from the air, breath after breath trying to crave that moment in my mind and memories. The pilot was chuckling and laughing at me, saying me words which had lost their sense in that moment. 

Because in that moment I was no longer me, but a butterfly, spreading its wings and floating in the playful air which was dancing around me, inviting me to lose my trace and abandon myself to its infinity. I was even tented to let myself blend with it, but I was figthing admirably against that urge, against the urge of merging into the sky and melting upon the silkiness of the clouds. I was no longer there, in an airplane; but somewhere between the birth of the universe, seeing how the first bit of light is potrounding the skies, and at the end of the world, witnessing the death of the sun. I could sense warm tears tracing wet lines on my cheeks, but it was a distant feeling, like I was completely detached of my physical form, I was an etheral force, navigating through the stars I used to gaze at every night of my childhood. And in a second, all the memories of the longing feeling I had everytime I was throwing glances to the sky came to me and made me realise that it didn't mattered if the death would have taken me in that moment. 

     I had became a butterfly. 

I'm still alive? Who knows? Maybe the stars or the butterflies will reply to you. Till then, draw your own dreams; draw them in lively colours, in shadows made by the black pencil, in words thrown upon sheets, in notes and sounds, in numbers divided into complicated operations, anyhow you want. Draw.