You're About to Hear the Butterflies Fight
Last night, I came across a screenshot of a tweet I made 10 years, 2 months, and 15 days ago.
“Sit really still,” she said while placing sliced oranges in her daughter’s lap. “You are about to hear the butterflies fight.”
This was from the days of 140-character Twitter, when the limitations bred creativity. Not locked-in-a-closet limitation, but more like a slightly-too-tight-corset limitation. Or are all corsets tight by definition? Loose underwear is the worst unless it’s loose from being drenched.
This tweet was a postcard from the past, its edges clean from being unseen. Even tho clunky and creepy, it pleased me. Of all the words from my past that could have been mailed back to me - frenetic references to fellatio, gratuitous use of the verb swallow - this one seems not me, and yet all me.
How would I write it differently now, if at all?
“Sit soft and still,” her mother whispered, arranging orange slices in her daughter’s lap. “You’re about to hear the butterflies fight.”
If I could hear beyond human, what would a flutter of butterflies sound like?
Laundry flapping on a clothesline?
Dry eyelids epileptically blinking?
If it was a swarm of monarchs, would their clumsy oversized wings leave my little girl limbs pink with minuscule abrasions?
While this actual scenario never occurred, my mother was very much this type of woman. In the nucleus of night, she’d come into my room and move my bed into the path of the moonbeams. Her walls were, and still are, a pinned artistry of scientific articles, watercolors, skulls, and feathers. She is Biophilia personified, no boundaries between She and Nature; no boundaries whatsoever, psychological, sexual or emotional. That’s unfair and slightly untrue as her boundaries are improving. Where once there was only an expanse of windblown prairie, she now has a little picket gate, it’s just missing a fence.
And so, maybe this tweet feels creepy because it places me too close to my mother’s wild yet intriguing weirdness.
An incised fruit filling the open mouth of my lap with a sticky drip.
A scent of citrus finding its way to my nose, an unasked-for penetration.
A thundercloud of butterflies startling me visually if not audibly.
Is this why she now nails oranges to trees, because I refused to be a butterfly arena?
What would life be like if I refused to refuse her? Why can’t we just let our parents be?
Sure, maybe I’m placing too much meaning on this one tweet. Maybe I’m combing through it for some helpful nit of knowledge, because the upside to lice is having your hair washed by your mother. I never contracted lice, but I also hated having my hair brushed. Just another way I rejected her mothering. And this whole time, I thought my mom rejected the role of Mother when maybe I rejected the role of Daughter.