A brown butterfly lay dried in the corner of my room….
Quiet as a sealed prophecy,
Still as the last breath of an old version of me.
It carried the dust of all my abandoned selves:
The child who learned to survive without witness and caresses,
The woman who loved like an unhealed wound
searching for a mirror to reflect…
Its wings folded like prayer scrolls,
like the forgotten pages of my destiny
finally closing on their own.
I touched it….
and the room exhaled every ghost
I didn’t know I was still holding.
The air shifted.
A chapter died without a sound,
Without noise,
Without chaos.
They say butterflies bring messages,
but this one brought a funeral….
Not of life,
But of the karmic loops I kept dancing in
like a blind ritual repeated across lifetimes.
No more returning to men who tasted like storms.
No more surrendering to hearts
that couldn’t hold the ocean in mine.
No more rewriting the same childhood ache
in the hands of different faces.
I buried its body in the darkness of a potted plant,
and something inside me was buried with it…
A cycle,
A sorrow,
A timeline….
That no longer recognized my name
Or, could tame me.
As I covered its wings with earth,
I felt the universe unthread an old fear from my spine:
The fear of being left alone,
The fear of being unloved,
The fear that destiny is a crooked architect
building heartbreak into every room of my future self,
But destiny doesn’t crack….
It curves.
It folds and unfolds,
It spirals into the next version of you,
Once you have been finally announced dead to your past.
The moon whispered,
“Your next love will not be a mirror of your wounds.”
The stars echoed,
“You will not bleed for the wrong souls again.”
And I…..
Reborn from a dead butterfly,
Reborn from the child I used to cradle alone,
Reborn from every goodbyes that cut too sharper…
I rose.
Soft, but unbreakable.
Haunted, but divine.
A goddess resurrected
from her own emotional funeral…
Like a Phoenix…
The brown butterfly was only a messenger…
Its death the omen of my rebirth.
Tonight, I sleep in a room with cleaner air,
A lighter chest,
and a destiny that no longer terrifies me.
For even in death,
The smallest wings can close the largest timelines..
and even in silence,
the universe speaks through the bodies
of things that die so we can live again.
©® Farheen Akter Bhuian Nancy
Time Frame: 10.29 am, Tagar, MIST, Mirpur Cantonment.