This piece was first published in issue twenty-seven. You can buy the issue here or subscribe here.

The entrance to the butterfly house looked like the door at the local butcher’s. It was a heavy, transparent PVC curtain, each clear strip shaped like fat fettuccine. Despite its eerie façade, the home of the miniature, quivering creatures was always my favourite. A trip to the zoo felt incomplete without entering their human-sized enclosure. In the butterfly house your clothes felt damp, and it never smelt like home. Even so, standing amid the foliage, a nervous kind of happy overcame me. Peering towards the ceiling I would watch the butterflies as they flew in a jilted, mistimed waltz. And as they hovered close towards me, I felt like I was floating too. 

“Stand still, Kathryn,” my dad would whisper, “and maybe one will land on you.” But I never quite knew how to oblige the perching butterfly. It was like having my cheeks pinched by a distant relative. I felt kind of special, but I kind of wanted it to stop.

When I was a little older I became acquainted with a new breed of butterfly. An intangible variety unlike the ones I had watched flying when I was small. I met these butterflies the very first time I fell in love. I was in kindergarten, his name was Xavier, and he had bought my Barbie a golden party dress. When I sat next to him at story time, an uneasy content would surface uninvited. There they were, the butterflies, softly pounding my intestinal linings, devilishly tickling the spot just behind my belly button. At first it only happened with Xavier, so I figured it must have been his fault. “Maybe Xavier’s a wizard,” I hypothesised.

As a self- and professionally-diagnosed fusspot, I learned in time that my butterflies weren’t going to go away. When I was a girl I managed to kill a dozen goldfish, countless flowerbeds of daisies and disfigure most of my older brother’s Lego men. But the butterflies, I couldn’t shake them. From my first day of school, to each new encounter, to my first French kiss, the internal flutters would diligently resurface as if instinctively following some enigmatic cue. But like any bodily foible, not dissimilar to an intense allergy, or a kooky-sounding sneeze, I learned to love my quivering insides.

I discovered, of course, that I was not alone. That this having butterflies in your tummy thing wasn’t quite as curious as I had once believed. It was, in fact, quite ordinary. But I reviled this newfound knowledge. Like any middle child, I was fond of the idea that there was something about me that was a little different and unique. But turns out my butterflies are just the result of my body’s flight or fight response, whirring into action when there’s a supposed threat to my survival. The butterflies aren’t really butterflies at all. They’re just some stray neurons running along my brain-gut axis, letting my stomach know that I’m kind of freaking out. It’s an evolutionary function, and it’s perfectly okay. This response arises to something like a swarm of bees heading towards my naked honey-covered body, or a herd of angry animals stampeding straight for me in a desert at a frightful speed.

But my butterflies don’t need such theatrical motives to mischievously take flight. And so, I’ve got to know them, an internal reminder that something might be really wrong or, in cases such as Xavier, that something may be really right.

And therein lies the beauty of my butterflies, my own personal warning that things are either turning sour or, if I’m lucky, turning sweet. Because these inner vibrations, as unexpected as they may at first appear, are much the same as the sensation that I felt when I was only small, standing in the butterfly house, waiting for the real thing to take its landing on my slender, outstretched arm. I’ve learned to trust these intangible, quivering creatures, and they have learned to trust me too. And now I smile as they dance just behind my belly button in a jilted, mistimed waltz.

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