Romantically desperate, I’ve been living the past twelve months as nothing more than a moth.
The nights became a two-faced witch, each giving calmness and nightmares. One folded me into an admirable creature, pollinating the parts of me that are in bloom to grow, to rise toward their own rays of love. While the latter kept me circling around thunders of something I wish I could forgive, pulling me back to where all of this began.
When I was a kid, my mother used to plant even though our home had no front yard. She grew an orange tree in a huge pot, allowing it to have enough space to spread its roots. I noticed every other day, she’d set her eyes on leaves that had caterpillars and patiently cut each ones while i stood beside her. Out of curiosity, I tried to play with those leaves before she warned me this fluffy animal would cause rashes on my skin. Her persistence to minimize the damage to our orange tree was quietly tiring, as if they could never truly be banished. Some already turning into pupae she would leave behind, knowing anything harsher might harm the tree itself.
Once, I was doing my homework when a butterfly was stuck to the wall above my computer, hanging there with its wings glued to the center of its back. No one had enough courage to touch it while my eyes glazed and slowly grew wider. Climbing onto the table, I slightly jumped to reach this butterfly and when my fingers finally touched it, I hurried to the door to free it. It flew, clapping its beautiful wings.
And growing up, perhaps, not all caterpillars turn into bright-colored butterflies. Maybe once in a while they curl into a pupa and become a cloudy grayish moth. Somehow, even now, I find myself living like one, more familiar with the night despite how cruelly it suffocates.
We were living side by side, surviving each in our own way. While my mother and I killed a lot of them, the ones who were meant to be born will fly. Back then, I was only witnessing how we took them before they had the chance to grow, as if we could stop what they were meant to become. Yet at the end, there isn’t much left to regret,
because at least, we had oranges.
