A Love With Wings

I learned that pain and trauma prepared me for disappointment, but not for a love that can’t stay.

Let me explain.

Losing family members, losing my son to miscarriage, losing a friend— it doesn’t mean those people shouldn’t have been in my life. It doesn’t mean I stop loving them or regret knowing them. It means they stayed long enough to bloom— and even flowers fade.

It’s understandable to want to pick a flower and keep it forever. To catch a butterfly and declare it yours… but you know the moment you do, you cause harm.

Maybe not to them, but certainly to yourself— because you believed that recognizing beauty meant you got to keep it. But you don’t. Just because you hope you get to keep something— a person, an experience— doesn’t mean you do.

If I were a butterfly, and you loved me, I’d land on your shoulder to hear your voice, and dance over your fingers so you’d know it was worth it… the not catching me part. Because I’d return to you every time you strolled through the garden.

That would be my way of loving you back.

Love can be love and not be meant to keep.

I can repeat it and still fight it. Vocalize it and still resent it… until I don’t.

I’m closer now, I think, to accepting that love can be real even if it can’t stay. Losing my grandmother to cancer didn’t undo the love I had for her. Losing my grandfather to old age didn’t undo the stories he told or the ones I told myself about us. And losing a friend to timing and circumstance doesn’t undo what we gave each other: mutual understanding, recognition, and a chance to mirror one another's worthiness of love.

I don’t have to keep something for it to be beautiful or for it to take up a permanent place in my memory. I can acknowledge its worth, revisit a scene from my life and kiss it because it shaped me. I can also accept that it makes me cry when I wish I could touch it again but can’t.

My contradictions may scare some people away, but that just makes the ones who stay—even if just long enough to hold my hand through a trial—so much lovelier.

I’m not sure I could hold everyone I love at once… perhaps that’s why they come in seasons.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone thinks of me that way. Like something beautiful they never meant to let go of but is better left alone to fly from flower to flower.

What if I promised to land on your shoulder? What if I gave you something unforgettable? What if… I was yours just once?

You reach for understanding, and I hold your hand. You look into my eyes and I see the world in yours. You’d feel seen but at some moment, you’d inevitably feel left, too.

Would you dare love me still?

Would you accept that maybe it wasn’t meant to last but it was still meaningful?

Would you allow yourself to be awed by my wings, even if the only time you felt them against your cheek was on my way out of your garden?

I hope so. I hope you’d know that even if I couldn’t stay, you’d always remain the person who created a place of refuge beautiful, and in turn, I hope my presence added something to your life— even if just for a little while. Even if afterward, all that remained of me was the knowledge that a butterfly once loved you.