In light of the airy but busy day, I walked up to the balcony to take a breath. There I watched a few birds play—the sky was their playground. Something about their size, excitement and the overall gambol told me they had just learned to fly. The day passed as most busy days passed; I did not know when it ended. By the evening, I had nothing to do except make a decision. So, I pondered over it as I sipped coffee in the evening. After the day had ended, when I descended into my palace of one, I stood on the balcony again under the blanket of the night. The sky was barely the playground I had seen last I saw it. It was quiet for the most part; the honking broke the pause now and then. All of us needed to breathe after making a decision, no matter how fortunate or otherwise the result. We needed to stop for a while when a decision was made. A pause, perhaps. I remembered the birds and their playfulness. It had rubbed off on me. All will be fine, and if not, there was always another decision to make. As long as we could decide what we wanted to do, as long as we could brave indecisiveness, all would be fine.
They often talk about metamorphosis and becoming a chrysalis, of turning into a beautiful butterfly, but no one talks about how the caterpillar must first turn into a gooey liquid of its remains. They never tell you how inside the pupa, as it slowly transforms into a butterfly, it still knows who it is and who it was, and perhaps, who it will be eventually. Why would it go through all the trouble if there was at least not an expectation? They talk about the butterfly breaking out of the soft shell made when it was still a wriggly worm, but they don’t tell you about the most important thing of all: despite dissolving into nothingness, the butterfly remembers. It remembers when it was but a caterpillar, and perhaps, it also remembers when it was suspended between life and death and how it kept waiting after all.
They never talk about it, and the butterfly never mentions it. It was an untold secret since the beginning of time: all beautiful things were created by choice; it was always a decision; all decisions came at a cost. Often, the cost was remembering.