Memory often develops into metaphor in hindsight.
When I was very young I saw a butterfly trapped inside a lantern.
The lantern was old, dusty, and hanging high in a corner of my fathers shed, which was full of shelves packed with old dusty things, all enveloped in the musty smell of grease, rust, and wood. The lantern was red, and to me, with no context of time, it seemed ancient, something I’d seen in old movies about older times.
I don’t know what kind of butterfly it was. Large, dark, frantic with its beating wings and panicked feet tapping at the grimy glass.
Fear is so easy to recognize, so easy to want to ease.
My father explained what had happened. As a caterpillar it wandered in through the seams of the lantern and now, metamorphosized, it couldn’t get back out.
The solution seemed simple to a simple child; can we break open the lantern to free the butterfly?
He explained, reasonably, rationally, how the life of a butterfly, already dying, wasn’t worth the loss of the lantern. The lantern was useful, was needed, and the butterfly would enjoy at best a day of freedom before it fell prey to some bird in the bushes, some frog in the ponds.
Letting the butterfly feel the sunlight on its wings would extinguish the lantern forever.
It wasn’t a justifiable trade. The butterfly wasn’t worth saving.
Seeing the pain I felt for it, at the pain that continued agonizingly above us though this entire lesson, my father reassured me that the butterfly would be dead the next day.
It wasn’t.
I can’t recall ever seeing the lantern without terrified wings fluttering inside like dark smoke.
I can’t recall us ever using the lantern.
…
Looking up reference photos for this drawing, it occurs to me he probably could have just opened it. Neither had to be sacrificed.
I don’t know how to feel about that.
