Blinking-bright butterflies once beautifully blemished the tantalizing summer breeze—little specks to the naked eye, yet specks of color and growth. They rose with the smiling sun in the early hours of the day and drunkenly dropped back to the floor of flowers when night lavishly laid across the horizon once more.

Incandescent beating of wings sounded over the rolling hills as the rays of summer sun filtered through the stained glass of their intricate tints. A tinge of loved life emanated from those wings, rich color coating the land.

It was a drink of a time.

Clutter—the kind that warmed the heart—carried in the breeze; romantically and remarkable, it was far from overwhelming. 

It was the clutter of existence. The clutter of what was here and what was yet to come. The clutter of what lay beyond those clouds, the ones we both looked to in the effervescent ether. The kind of clutter that brought you home like a beaming beacon at night. The kind of clutter that led you into a forest of unknown at daybreak.

The kind of clutter that meant life and all of its boundless possibilities.

And in all of that string of never-ending days in that never-ending epoch, rapture met no rain, and happiness never halted. Cluttered winds and the mosaic of wing-born color spilled across the months into a priceless portrait almost as if Picasso himself had been the artist behind it all. 

No smile forced, no laugh faked, it was intoxicating in every broken way, and it was mine.

I took a piquant sip of it every morning when my eyes fluttered open; I undeniably indulged in life as if I had known its poisoned secret—one as barbed and broken as warm and worshipped—every time I brought the glass to my coveting lips.

Yet the glass ran empty, for better or worse, at the hands of the obscure, and I was left with none. There was no more breeze that could bury the darkness and iniquity beyond my eyes. Nature no longer sang in hums of heavenly hues across the hills; instead, it cowered back into its roots, and the eternal esse fled to a refuge my heart could not handle.

And when life did not call through my windows, did not “flutter” my eyes open, a Herculean hold took over my mind as life—the one so stirring and sweet with that drink down my hatch—mutated to a vexed view.

And that obscurity behind it all left me befuddled.

I did this to myself, right? So let that obscure be me. I drank the lies knowing it would fade.

Or let the obscure be the world for giving so much at once. Too much beauty blinded me from my reality, tricking me into a version I didn’t deserve.

Let that obscure be those around me as they twisted their lies into sweets. Trust—something I should have kept—was placed into feeble feelings around me, feeble friends, feeble facts when I should have seen that the weight would eventually come crashing down.

But please, let the butterflies rise again. No matter the obscure, no matter the day, no matter whether my glass is filled or inevitably empty, let life feel as it once did, and let me feel whole again.

Let life resume.