Tört Szárnyú Pillangók – Broken Winged Butterflies

The last thing I want is for this entry to be about me. But there’s no escaping the inevitability that a writer’s job is ultimately for every entry to be about his/her personal experience, cloaked in the beauty of literature. Words get moulded to every occasion and phrases get used and overused and misused and almost abused just to fit the heightened mood of excitement. Never does a writer offer her craft selflessly. Never is the reader made to forget whose words they’re reading. A thankless effort, but someone has to point out the pure selfishness of writing. The art for art’s sake pedagogy, that floods any other idea hidden on the page. The selfish deed, the writer’s work.

But there are people who cannot write and cannot sing and cannot shout. There are children who with no thought of the self live and play and dream. It is only I who is sitting here ashamed that I am not more like those who stay silent and humble and are never driven out of some useless desire to hear only their own voices. There are children who love because they can. They are fragile and different but they are beautiful butterflies. They don’t much care to see or hear themselves against a mirror. They don’t see the world and see evil. They love with their little hearts and fly with their broken little wings. They are children who will get nothing but abuse, mockery and hate from this world. And they will learn to never listen to those who only see their broken wings, but to embrace everyone else who sees them as whole.

And there are countries that cannot rise from the pains and marks of constant battering. For years and years the torture and the shame have burnt a mark that can never be erased. There are streets and valleys and cities where everything lies wasted, left to die, to rot, left to vanish and to disappear. My heart bleeds for places like these. My heart bleeds for a present that can never be real because of the past. The pain is too much to bear. The effort is too grave to undertake alone. So the country stands barely alive, barely breathing, just so we can walk on its back and catch lingering thoughts of days gone past. Nobody cares that infinity has vanished. The butterfly that once flew around colourful flowers is now broken and with its colours lost and its liveliness gone, is just waiting for a kind soul to come and step on what’s left so she can move on.

There’s a lot of brokenness in this world. There are a lot of people who see only themselves. There are a lot of fake preachers. But there are also a lot of butterflies.