Butterfly

Storm Dennis was in town and I was in hiding. That was pretty much the sum of it all now that the demons of the night had had their spiteful way with me, and now I was sat staring at the blood red curtains I’d closed against the bright and hopeful world.  

I had made a failure out of my life, and a spectacle of that failure. People only saw the intoxicated clown, the irresponsible fool. I kept the things I wanted the world to see to myself and left my soul out for the rubbernecking vultures that I imagined waited outside. 

One day soon I was going to have to make the necessary changes to survive and I didn’t know if I was capable, or even wanted to do that. Oblivion had lost its adolescent allure but not its steely grip. Why did I drink so much? My mother once told me I was a thirsty child, always wanting more to drink. Must be more to this than a perpetually dry throat.  

In the drunk and dark, I am a clown and a poet.   

Always this hell of the next day though, the sheer awkwardness of being who I am, what I am. I am not a normal person. I don’t think that was the plan anyway. I was a lonely, awkward child with a gift for mimicry. I was a desperately scared teenager with an ugly face and flawless skin. As an adult I had invented a shell. I climbed inside it on a bus one Monday lunchtime and had never got out. It was the easiest manoeuvre. I called it the grown up.  

The grown up was possessed of a staggering self-confidence. He was the first at the bar, the first on the dancefloor, the last at the bar. He could do things that the boy could never have done. He got up on stages, made people laugh. He talked to women.   

As he got older, he sometimes forgot that he was in a shell. But the boy inside was trying to be heard. Sometimes he would keep the grown up awake with prods to the soul, nudges to his memory, his little voice growing louder in the endless night. 

“I am still here.” 

People did not like me when I was anything but the grown up. But I wanted him to go away, take a break, and let the little boy take a turn in the spotlight. Not that the spotlight was any good for the little boy, it only made him clamber back behind the shell. And so I had to make a choice, I had to let one of them win, one must kill the other, because I needed some sleep.  

The little boy could not swim, so I would attempt to drown him in a sea of booze. But he would always wash up on the beach of mornings, coughing the water out of his exhausted lungs and feeling for the land between mermaid fingers. 

I wondered if the grown up was a creature of the sea, or the night. Perhaps he was a vampire and needed me to keep the curtains closed. Maybe he was a shark. Oh, shark, I will stay with you until I’m dead. I used to say that to him in the night. But I wanted him to go and not me. 

In my room, I play sad songs. The little boy loves these best. He remembers crying at Puff the Magic Dragon as a child and the other children mocking him. It was okay though, that was part of the deal. When people laugh at you, it is because they are scared of themselves. He had worked that out at a very young age. He was a bright boy but he didn’t know how to be clever. 

Now he was a lot older and still didn’t know how to be the person that people wanted him to be. He did not want things, he wanted purpose. He did not seek money, just time. And he was always wasting both because he didn’t have enough of either to be of use.  

Some people say we are all the lead actor in the drama of our lives. I feel like this film I’m starring in is continually changing directors, genres, endings. I wake up in kitchen-sink drama and fall asleep in thrillers. I have been a cowboy, a serial killer, a detective and a cartoon all in the same weekend. In the background, dramatic music plays, credits roll. 

 

I never wanted to be on a straight path, I prefer to never know where I am going. Each day is drearily predictable, except for the secret life. The boy and the grown up fight over what version of me gets to be seen. They tell me they know what’s best and I follow blindly. In the office, in the shower, in the bed, in the endless afternoons they tell me they love me and then tell me I am not worthy of love.  

In the night, they sing me to sleep and then scream their dreams at me. 

I do not know what is to become of me and I am too afraid to ask. Perhaps, this time, I’ll keep the curtains closed a little longer and wait to see if the boy and the grown up will finally slug it out. Perhaps I will transform, and my soul will burst from my ribcage and a thousand butterflies will emerge and all my anxieties will be free. I will rush to the curtains and to the window and I will open them and the butterflies will leave me, falling and rising in the summer air. People will look and wonder how they were trapped in my room and I will be at a loss to explain but I won’t care. For once, at last, I will not care.