Welcome. This is the story, of a butterfly, and a writer. I keep starting this story wrong.
First Draft
A butterfly lands on the narrator’s open notebook during a math class. Delicate wings, perfect timing, destiny symbolism. You know the drill.
Second Draft
I removed the class entirely. Made it about a butterfly in a museum case - the glass where it couldn’t hurt anyone. Something about distance and observation. Very neat. Very false. Imaginary. Class was the reality.
Third Draft
I tried honesty. “I saw a butterfly once and haven’t stopped thinking about it for five months.” I deleted it immediately. Too raw. Too obvious.
The problem is, I’m trying to make the butterfly mean something, when what I actually need to write about is this: I never knew what kind of butterfly it was. Not really. I made assumptions based on distant glimpses, the way it moved through certain spaces, the shade of its wings. Dark-Purple. Blue. But assumptions are just early drafts. And early drafts are often wrong.
Fourth Draft
Field Notes. Incomplete. The butterfly had a route. Or at least, I believed it did. There was a path - specific, unremarkable to anyone else - that it seemed to cross with some regularity. So I started walking it too. Every morning. Every evening. The same route, the same direction. I told myself it was research, to write a better story.
The first time I tried to saw it up close, it was wearing blue. Not a deep blue, not a dramatic blue. A quiet blue. The kind that doesn’t announce itself. I remembered the exact shade - the way the light hit it, the geometry of it. I set it as the pattern on my screen. Abstract. Geometric. Just a design I liked. Nothing more than that.
Once, I tried to offer a hand. Not literally - you don’t catch butterflies by reaching for them, any child knows that. But I extended something. An opening. A small, quiet gesture, the way you might leave a window open hoping the air will move the way you want it to. It didn’t land. Not a rejection, I told myself. Butterflies have compound eyes. They see everything from multiple angles simultaneously. Maybe it saw the hand perfectly well. Maybe it simply… didn’t need to land. Maybe, awareness without acknowledgment is, its own kind of answer.
I kept walking the path anyway.
Fifth Draft
Journal. Not the story. Something else. I think it’s time to start writing another story. Five months is long enough. Five months is long enough to understand that an open window is still just an open window, even if no wind comes through. Five months is enough to admit that the weight on your chest doesn’t disappear by waiting for it to - you have to set it down yourself. So. Another story. A new one. Something that doesn’t orbit the same quiet center. It isn’t anger, neither pride. I want to be clear about that. The butterfly doesn’t owe me anything. If anything - If anything, I’m grateful. I’m a better writer now. More observant. I notice things I didn’t notice before. The way light moves. The way a room changes when someone enters it. The way silence can be louder than anything said.
The butterfly made me pay attention. And attention is not nothing. Attention is almost everything. So yes. Another story. I’ll start tomorrow.
Sixth Draft
The morning of the test, I had a feeling. The irrational, quiet certainty that I would see the butterfly today. Close. Closer than I had in months. It turns out, it was sitting directly behind where I’d been sitting. I finished the test early. Fifteen minutes early, which never happens. My hand was moving faster than usual, or maybe my mind was somewhere else entirely. I left the room. Come back, to write the unfinished story. I don’t believe in signs. I believe in coincidence and probability and the human brain’s talent for finding patterns where none exist. I believe all of that. But the feeling was real. And the butterfly was there. And yesterday I wrote about starting another story, and today the universe did not care about that at all.
Seventh Draft
That same evening, I looked at the butterfly again. Not the way I usually did, not the quick glance or the familiar assumption. I looked at what it carried. The image it had chosen. The face it wore. And there was, something, there. Something I didn’t recognize. So I sat down, and I read quietly, and I understood slowly. A character. From a story I had never entered. Someone who was not what people first assumed. Someone controlled, not loud. Someone whose depth lived in the silence between words, not in the words themselves. Dark in the way that deep water is dark - not because there is something dangerous at the bottom, but because the light simply hasn’t reached that far yet.
The butterfly was never innocent.
And I didn’t mean it the way it sounds. Not as an accusation. Not as a warning. Just an observation. Quiet, almost gentle. That, what I had been writing was only a sketch. A surface. The real butterfly had always been more than the version I’d invented in my early drafts. More layered. More still. More deliberately itself than I had ever given it credit for.
I had been writing the wrong butterfly the entire time. But I liked it anyway. I liked it more, actually. Because the real one was more interesting than the one I’d made up. The real one had edges I hadn’t seen. Depths I hadn’t imagined. And none of that made it less beautiful - it made it more. The way a story becomes more interesting when you realize the character you thought was simple is actually the most complicated one in the room.
The butterfly was never innocent, and that’s okay. I liked it anyway. I still do.
Eighth Draft
Here is what I know now, or think I know. The butterfly does not know it changed me. It doesn’t need to. Transformation doesn’t work that way - it doesn’t require permission from the catalyst, doesn’t need a signature or an acknowledgment. A butterfly that shifts your flight path doesn’t know it’s doing so. It just exists, in its particular way, and you are different afterward, and neither of those things cancels the other out.
Innocent and guilty are the wrong words. They assume intent, and intent is not the point. Acceptance and rejection are the wrong words too. They assume a transaction, and this was never a transaction.
The butterfly just is - controlled, dark-blue-winged, quiet, real. Exactly what it is, without apology or explanation.
And I just am too. Changed. Attentive. Still walking the path, not because the butterfly is on it, but because the person who walks this path is who I have become. And I like him. I like him better than who he was before.
The blue pattern stays on my screen. As a fact. A color I carry now, the way you carry a song you heard once in a room you’ll never go back to.
I probably won’t finish this story. Not really. Not because there’s nothing left, but because some things don’t resolve. They just continue, quietly, in the background, shaping the way everything else is written.
Ninth Draft
I’ll probably start writing it someday. Or maybe I’ll just keep walking the path.