Human Butterfly

“You are safe in here, but don’t you want to see what’s outside?”

“I have less than the life span of a butterfly once I step into the light.”

“Yes, but your condition stops you living.”

“I’m fine in here.”

“Don’t you want to know what’s out there?” Thalia asked, wistfully.

I could see the excitement dancing in her eyes like the fireflies – a simile she often used. She spoke in poetry, trying to share the richest descriptions with me she could, in hopes of filling me in on what I was missing.

“This place is depressing,” she said. “Eternal darkness… it mightn’t kill your body, but it will kill your spirit.”

“I don’t know any different.”

“It’s like being blind from birth and never getting to explore the world with your eyes.”

“You can’t miss something you never had,” I said.

My name is Viola and I have spent seventeen years of my life inside my own confined world. Whenever my mother was pregnant with me, I got to travel around freely in her womb, but sadly, at that point, I couldn’t see anything.

I don’t tell Thalia how much I ache to see the real world because I know she would open the door to it, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that. Is it worth ending my life for a day of beauty?

Whenever I was still developing, before my mother gave birth to me in 2323, the doctors spotted a sign of the condition on my scan. They could single out every one of my organs in their footage and right beside my brain was a light absorber that pulls in light to the point of over-saturation. If I’m exposed to light for longer than a day, I will die. Knowing this has never really bothered me, because I’ve always known it. My mother had always been honest with me. Her mother had the condition and she had died from exposure to the light within twelve hours. It was a new notion to doctors then; they didn’t know the intricacies of the condition or how to avoid the outcome of it. But that knowledge helped my mother protect me. She built this home for me and made it a loving place, although it is enshrouded in darkness. The only freedom I got was at night time, whenever we sat on the lawn under the stars. My sister has always been free to come and go as she pleases, but she is careful to never open the front door whenever I am in the vicinity of it. I have to shut myself away in the loft whenever she sets out so I’m as far from the light as possible. I don’t know for sure what a second of light exposure would do to my body, but we’ve always thought it best not to take the risk to find out.

This year, my mother passed away. It was sudden but peaceful. Her heart stopped in her sleep. The three of us lived alone together – my sister and I were both products of one parent reproduction. It was discovered last century and has become as popular as double parent reproduction. My mum has always been an independent character, and it suited her to have the two of us to herself. Keeping my world smaller has aided in protecting me and ensuring my survival until the age of seventeen. Whenever she passed away, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I instantly became responsible for my own wellbeing whenever she had always taken care of it before, but I found myself with sudden free will too. If I wanted to step out into the world, it was up to me. Still, I missed her companionship terribly. She was one of just two people in my life. That’s a huge loss.

My sister has always been a bit of a rebel. She says she likes to get out and “live.” She tells me so many stories of the “real world.” Her descriptions are delicious. It makes me wish I could see for myself. I know as my sister, she shouldn’t want to lure me out there. She knows it would be the end of me, but I beg her to tell me every detail. I can safely use torches to look at pictures in books and magazines, but darkness suits me best. I like drawing images in my mind, closing my eyes and basking in their beauty.

Thalia tells me it’s Midsummer now – her favourite time of year. I asked her why and she told me a million reasons. She says the sun is at its brightest. I would still like to see its life-giving light even though it would be the death of me. She tells me about the succulent strawberries growing on vines outside our house. She brings some inside for me, but I’ve never seen them in the process of growing. She says there is a strawberry patch a few miles from our house and children like to go fruit-picking there, skipping home with filled punnets and squeals of glee. There is a sunflower field too, with flowers that tower over our heads. She says their petals are the colour of happiness, like bright faces beaming down on the world beneath them. She brought one home once and I examined it under torchlight. I knew it didn’t look the same as it would have swaying in the gentle summer breeze amidst all its fellow sunflowers. There are heads of hydrangea, and she tells me they grow in sky blue, candyfloss pink and gemstone lilac. I wish I could see them flowering with my own eyes. My two eyes work perfectly, which I think makes it more difficult, because all it would take would be a couple of steps for me to see this visual feast for myself. Sometimes, on clear nights, I get to go outside whenever the sun is asleep and look at the stars dancing in the night sky. They are beautiful and the air is fresh but everything else is obscured. How I desire to see the daytime explosion of colour! The older I get, and the more I hear, the more of a pang I feel for this unknown world that is waiting for me, right on my doorstep.

My mother warned me to never ever set foot outside, to never give in to temptation. She said I would be signing my life away in exchange for a pretty view. She downplayed the beauty outside and told me of many horrors I was avoiding by being inside. But Thalia had a way with words, and she painted pictures with them that I wanted to jump right into.

She told me about the bees jumping from flower to flower, joyfully busy in their work, filling gardens with their telltale hum. She described butterflies, with their fragile wings, there for a moment, gone the next, as ephemeral as I am. She described the sea in summer: it’s blue waters that reflected the sky above it and the sound of water lapping the edges of the shoreline.

I could no longer content myself with my limited existence. For so many years, I had managed. I had tons of books to read, my trusty torch, a loving mother and a sister filled with so much description I could almost pretend I’d seen the sights with my own eyes. But I was approaching adulthood. The next month, I was going to turn eighteen and I wanted more from the world. Eventually, Thalia would move out and I’d be left alone in our boarded-up home, like something rotting beneath the floorboards. What would I do then? How would I keep myself entertained? Her daily updates were what I lived for, now my mother was gone.

One day, early in the morning, Thalia and I sat down together by torchlight and drank some tea she made from herbs she’d found outside. It was deliciously fresh, and I wished I could touch the growing herbs with my fingertips, bringing the scent to my nose. I was tired of receiving the offcuts of another person’s experiences. We had a long, intense discussion. I told her my thoughts. She didn’t seem shocked; she acted like she’d seen it coming all along, even though I hadn’t. I guess the lure of what awaited me in the outside world was too great, so hand in hand, we opened the door, and I stepped out into the blinding sunshine.