Feeling: whimsical
Listening to: Honeyflood - Buddha
Reading/Watching: Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

I used to be a butterfly. I claimed it as my personal mascot, and thought I was terribly original.

I did the same thing with the color purple: no tentative lilacs, I wanted deep, rich, could-be-confused-with-blue-or-black purple. And I claimed it as mine. Then, it seemed, the rest of the world borrowed from me (or at least, that's how it felt), and I saw millions of would-be-original little pre-teen girls wearing bold, glittery purple butterflies. I kinda wanted to kill myself.

I held on to it, because I decided I was both too cool to follow a fad, and to cool to drop something just because it became a fad. I was double-cool. I was so careless of public opinion, I didn't even care if I seemed to be courting it. Or some lie like that.

Butterflies are, of course, very poetic. It's why they're featured in paintings and stories as symbols of freedom or rebirth (including two I have on my walls). Their life cycle is the classic ugly-duckling story, and every girl (even mon coeur's sweetheart Alexis Bledel) probably believes she's an ugly duckling in process. They start out life small and humble, and then go into hiding and reinvent themselves as something lovely and delicate and lacey-winged, although the butterflies actually found in nature are not often idolized on glittery t-shirts, because that odd monarch-butterfly-burnt-orange doesn't really work as a gel pen color.

Recently I have decided to give up on the butterfly as a personal symbol. I mean, they're still beautiful and poetic and symbolic of good things, but I think that if my life were actually parallel to a butterfly's, I would be dead by now. Once they transform, they really don't live much longer. They're fragile, they run from danger, they get squashed very, very easily (probably because the memory of being a worthless caterpillar is still vivid in their ugly-duckling minds).

So I think maybe I'd rather be something else. The hunt is on for a new mascot. One that doesn't die in a stiff wind.

Comments? 0 so far...
Not a Diaryland member? Sign the Guestbook.