When she was young, she would pry glass jars open, releasing the ugly caterpillars inside, watching them break the cocoon and metamorphose into pretty butterflies that fluttered away free into the wide blue skies.

She yearned to be a butterfly.

When she was young, she discovered that butterflies are the quintessential migrants, traveling extensively, carrying the souls of people, spreading the nectar of life that diffuses into the fragrant air.

She yearned to be a butterfly.

When she was young, she found that butterflies don’t live long, attacked as they were by ruthless predators- hunger on their depraved tongues, a retribution suffered for being blessed with grace and dignity.

She yearned to be a butterfly.

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Then she got a little older and stopped thinking of butterflies.

Soon, darkness came looking for her.

It was a stormy night. She was alone, in her squalid room, possessed of grimy dampness.

And then she felt,

Shadows bursting in flames,

White-hot inside of her,

Smoke-filled soot,

Clogging and cloying,

Fighting for space,

When there was none.

And then she felt,

Pain exploding in spasms,

An eternity’s electric bitterness,

Spreading its tentacles,

Crude carnal thirst,

Draining her blood,

When there was none. 

And then she felt,

Her modesty burning in fits,

Within the forests of peeling plasters,

The vortex of misery,

Spiraling into great depths,

Wrecking her life,

When there was none.

Thus, she learnt to hate, that night, with a passion so strong, it never dissipated. It shattered her mind, her heart, and her spirit.

Those wounds festered and never healed. She became a slave to them, and they became her masters. Often, they came hunting, as the walls closed in, the roof crumbled, and the floor dissolved into a liquid mess. They protected her from a self-destructive desire to live in denial.  

But she realized one day that she preferred mirages to realities.

And so she ran away.

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She became a gypsy. She liked that nobody knew her and she knew nobody. She felt pure and austere. She felt like an ascetic who had renounced everything to profound solitude.

She didn’t want to rest, now. Not ever. And through the windows of time frozen, she observed faces, and people—there was an eerie simplicity about them. She tried to anchor herself in the hazy blurriness of a few moments she had spent with them. She couldn’t. She had no roots.

However, she would always carry the root of darkness with her. After all, it was her only shelter. ************************************************************************