I feel like I should cry, but I don’t. My face dry of sorrow, I perch on the chair next to your hospital bed, wallowing in memories. The memories, sweet like sugar, warm me up and fill me like a made up reality.
I glance at your face. I should see your pale skin, your blue eyes closed, the veins trembling on your cheeks, but I don’t. Instead, I see your face, sparkling with happiness, the trace of cinnamon on your lip giving you away as the cookie thief. I see you laughing, dancing around the living room wearing fairy wings and a tutu. I am losing myself in all these Mariposas, each one the same and different.
The high sounding wails of the machine pierce into me, and the Mariposas fall out of my mind so quickly that I startle from their vacant space in my mind. Reality- and not my made up one- falls upon me heavily, and I sink into the chair, my fingers gripping the side of your bed.
“Mariposa?” I say your name. My words sound loud and heavy, sinking into the room. Your face is so empty of anything that I can’t even believe it’s you.
The door opens, and a torrent of doctors spill in, talking.
“Is she okay?” I ask, so tentative and quiet that no one hears me. I glance back at you. White gloved hands are cradling your face now, taking your pulse and adjusting the tubes that run into your skin.
“Is she okay?” I ask again, my voice growing with tension. A couple of nurses glance over at me, but return to their work of adjusting you in the bed.
“Is she okay!?” I finally shout. My words torpedo through the room and sink into the floor as the doctors stare at me in surprise, as if they hadn’t seen me in the room.
“She’s in a grave state,” one of them finally says.
“We need to move her to a different room,” a nurse says.
“Can I come?” I ask.
“Honey, she’s in a really dangerous state. Like a butterfly, you know? That’s how delicate she is right now. I don’t know if you should...” her voice trails off in my mind. I don’t hear anything, except for the word butterfly, fluttering inside my brain. Coming out of my self induced trance, I remember.
Butterflies.
Rewind.
Your first word was ‘butterfly’.
By the time you were six, I could’ve said that butterfly was a synonym for you. Somehow, you had grown into it, like the three year old who becomes obsessed with princesses. Only, it wasn’t quite that. It was more as if you had found a pair of shoes that fit no matter how your feet changed.
As your world of butterflies grew more and more, I came to dislike them more and more. Our apartment, once a blend of our family pasted on the walls- my artwork, Mama’s pictures, and Papa’s wallpaper, had become replaced by you. In order to please you, Papa took down his favorite wallpapers to replace them with ones decorated by small butterflies. Mama’s pictures almost always had butterflies. My artwork was slowly taken over by your butterfly coloring pages. And my dislike began to crowd over butterflies, until I grew completely sick of them, and your obsession with them.
Fast forward to the summer you were seven.
Once, at Wal-Mart, Mama saw a dress whose pattern was that of a monarch butterfly’s wings.
“This dress would be absolutely perfect for Mariposa,” Mama said, smiling widely.
“No, it wouldn’t.” I grumbled. The dress made me sick, all of those butterflies.
