The butterfly’s story

‘If you love something set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours, if not it was never meant to be.’ How many times have we all heard this saying? Most of us have agreed with it, some of us have rejected it, or just brushed it away with indifference. But there’s a time in life when we all come to embrace it. And it happens to be the most painful moment of them all. The moment when we realize that we have to set that ‘something’ or ‘someone’ free.

Many people tend to believe that real love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. In truth, the spiritual affinity between two souls can be created in a moment just as much as it can be created in years. If we keep believing in stereotypes and clichés we may find that we’re caught unguarded. The deepest love can be borne in a heartbeat, in the strangest places and circumstances, because it does not discriminate. When you fall for someone’s personality, everything else about them becomes beautiful. Each and every one of their imperfections, big or small, is perfect to your eyes.

I know the story of someone who is very close to me. She has once fallen for a man’s personality, profoundly, irreversibly, magically. In some twist of fate, he seemed to have fallen in love too with her personality. But some day something wrong she’d done changed the way he regarded her. She did remain the same bubbly, funny clown who had brightened his days for a while, who had been there for him unconditionally and had helped him in every possible way. The woman with whom he had had an amazing connection, a connection that very few people are able to experience. And even though she had sinned, it had not been to achieve a personal gain. It had been the sin of pure love. A sin, nonetheless. She has now let her butterfly go, wondering if it was ever hers. When love is not something that is shared, it becomes one’s cross that they are doomed to carry on their shoulders, heavier and more unbearable with each step they take. My friend has a lifetime ahead of her to wear her cross on her back.

I have once played a little with the letters of the word ‘MIRACLE’. There is a hidden message that perhaps God himself has put in it: RECLAIM. The realization made me believe that we should be strong enough to legitimately reclaim the miracles as being our own making. I’d thought back then that we, people, could be strong enough to do anything we want. But there are moments when I think that this is just an illusion. Moments when I think that the tragedy of life is not death, but what dies inside us as we ebb away: hope, the desire to live, to achieve. And that’s when we grieve without words. Unspoken grief bleeds inwardly and leaves scars that cannot be healed.

May the butterfly find its way home. Wherever home is.