Blue Morpho Love
By Z Zoccolante
When she opens her eyes, salt tears dried against her cheeks, she remembers that she’s capable of expansive romantic feats and feelings, like oceans and sky. Fingertips tracing infinity, her name in his mouth.
They travel together through the dark sides of the moon and meet again, against thousands of others who crowd into the room as it dims and dancing lights swirl around the ether, playing the tune with that faint hint of memory from jumping to earth.
She remembers him like trees remember the wind, in that soft part of her heart that heartbreak tried to kill, throwing sticks and stones that broke nothing but bruised everything. But there are chambers and caverns unknown, compartments that open with the memory of falling and dancing and laughter in the belly of millions of stars.
But she has known beyond the rings of invisible purple kisses. She’s known a break, a shatter of glass confetti, when others had to step in. When the Divine had to hold her up with puppet breaths and walk her through the world on strings. Collapsed in her kitchen like a slug curled up as an older me with palms around her face whispers, “It will be ok, I promise, I tell you the truth.”
But she can’t see it yet and so I am just with her the way that tribal people belong to the earth and the earth to them, how disaster and opportunity is a flip of a coin, how we, like nature in our absence, continues on without us.
Rewind. She’s under the sun, in flower pastel shorts and shirt, and she sees this is where she thought she had to change the colors of her to be loved. That somehow it was shameful not to fit in. Painful. But she didn’t fit in, and it was more painful to hide. And I think what she was looking for was what we’re all looking for along the way – that we can show up and shine and still be loved.
A part of me says to the part of her then, “You could wear pink clothes every single day of the year and we’d still love you.” Tears slide down. She takes a breath and looks up at the sky, the hum of voices in the field. She thinks of blue morpho butterflies tickling her throat, pushing their wings against her teeth. And as she opens her lips, they take flight, blue shimmer wings against a brilliant blue sky.
With Love,
Z :)
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