Depressing Poetry

Butterfly

I thought I wanted to be a butterfly 

To shed my skin and open my eyes 

But not to cities, concrete, and greying skies 

I can't touch clear waters, I must stay dry 

Must instead drown myself in color and dye

My colorful wings catch a boy's eye 

Nets and patience are carefully applied 

Because I am beautiful, and so I must die 

A pin through my back, a label marked July- 

No. I don't want to be a butterfly.

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Alright, so I think this one needs a footnote to explain. April is poetry month, and I was looking up writing prompts because I had no inspiration. When the word butterfly came up, I immediately latched onto it.

See, from a very early age, I was called a butterfly girl, because I was easily distracted and ran after, you guessed it, butterflies. They were the most fascinating things in the world to a five-year old girl. Whenever someone called me Butterfly Girl, I'd just have the BIGGEST grin on my face.

My friend in girl scouts, Moira, had a huge backyard, and an older brother fond of insects. I saw him catch a butterfly, a monarch, my favorite, in a net, and then he put it in a jar. I watched it flit around and eventually come to a stop after he sprayed the inside with... I don't remember what it was. He took the butterfly out of the jar. It wasn't moving. I asked- Jim, I think his name was Jim- I asked Jim why she (all butterflies were girls, of course. Would a five-year old think differently?) wasn't flying anymore, and he said it was because of the I-don't-remember. Wasn't it water? It looked like water. And then he took out a pin. It didn't have a little colorful ball on the end like the straight pins Grandma had in that small red pillow she was always sticking little sharp things in. I was taken from my comparison of his plain pin to the brighter ones of Grandma when Jim PUT THE PIN THOUGH THE BUTTERFLY and OH MY GOD HOW COULD HE and I just SCREAMED. When I got over the initial shock, he said, "Calm down. It's just a bug." Just a bug? He just killed the most beautiful thing in the world, and he tells me it was JUST A BUG? I felt sick. I nearly threw up. He hung it up next to THREE DOZEN other butterflies, beetles and dragonflies on his wall. And then, he wrote, on a little strip of paper on the cork, in that clear and elegant script of a big kid that I never quite achieved even ten years later, "July 19, 2003".

I must have repressed the memory, because this is the first time in ten years that I could recall everything. It was the most traumatizing event of my young life, I think.

And wow. Long footnote. Don't kill me.