Tatoo’d Butterflies

“Will you ever get a tattoo?”, she asked me, as James Blunt crooned ‘Goodbye My Lover’ through the desktop speakers. The chill night air blew through the open French windows of the 12th floor flat and I felt it touch my soul. “Yes”, I replied, hesitating. “I had a plan once but… “

I took a sip as nostalgia came flooding back into my mind. Memories always seem to be have a habit of hiding in the corner ready to jump on you at the right moment, I thought to myself. I wondered what she was doing right now as Coldplay’s Fix You started to play.

“What was the plan?”, she asked again as we sat in the dark.

“It’s obvious”, I said, not wanting to answer. I leaned back on the mattress and drifted back into those memories.

“What’s so obvious?”, She asked again.

Sensing that I was lost in reverie, She took a sip of her drink.

“I don’t like those butterflies”, She said after a while, snapping me out from my daydreams. She was looking at the paintings leaning on the left side corner of the room against an almirah. They had been painted just a few days back and had not been put up yet.

Thankful to the change of topic, I found myself at the inquiring end. “Why don’t you?”, I asked her.

“I don’t know.. Its wing is broken. Butterflies are such delicate creatures, no?”, she replied after a pause.

Butterflies aren’t the only fragile ones, I said to myself as I poured another drink.

“Why did it have to break? Why should something so beautiful meet such a sad and pitiful end?”, she continued.

“What do we know of its life? And of its death? ”, I interjected.

She pondered over it for a moment and said, “Something so beautiful could not have lived an evil life. Why can’t we be more like it?”

“You know, it was a cocoon, once upon a time”, I said. “and only by breaking its bonds was it able to achieve this beauty. Come to think of it, isn’t most of our life lived safe within a cocoon? It’s only past 25 or so that we actually get to break it and emerge out into the world.”

“Hmm…”, she said, “I still wish we could fly though.”

I left my drink, got up and walked out into the balcony as Gilmour’s Comfortably Numb wafted into the night air.

This was written as a classroom assignment where we had to write a short story in 500 words inspired from a real life event of our life.