Blue Butterfly Dreams

A butterfly. Not just any butterfly, though. She has seen this butterfly before. Electric blue, incandescent, intricately patterned wings, and a melodic song. She didn't know butterflies made sounds apart from the flapping of wings. She'd seen other butterflies before but never heard them, definitely not like this. The melody of its song was mesmerizing, it made her want to dance, but she decided to run instead.

She can feel it leading her somewhere she is meant to be; a place unknown that feels like the way home.

*Ding dong*

She groans unintelligibly as she wakes up to a dark room.

*Ding Dong*

And that would be the doorbell ringing, at 3:00AM, which she would know if she could find the cellphone she is scrambling through her sheets for.

*Ding Dong*

"Coming!!", she shouts, giving up on the phone for now anyways. Just barely avoiding the edge of her too big for her tiny apartment blue loveseat on her brisk walk to the bright yellow front door, she groans again shaking off a little bit more of the sleep still stuck to her like a koala clinging onto a tree.

*Ding Dong*

Instead of yelling at the stranger on the other side of the door about the insistent ringing of her doorbell she yanks the door open perhaps a little too aggressively and finds that in a matter of seconds the stranger had managed to somehow disappear without a trace. This stood out to her as her apartment is the only door at the end of a long and narrow hallway, accessed only through an equally narrow staircase in the back of her San Francisco apartment building that houses a vegetarian restaurant, that had definitely seen better days, on the first floor.

Before closing the door, annoyed as hell, she notices a small black notebook on her entry mat. Intrigued, she picks it up and takes it inside with her. Now too awake to go back to bed, she makes her way to her kitchen to make herself a cup of joe dropping the little black book on the island along the way.

She leaned against the counter as her coffee brewed and admired her kitchen, the only reason she had gotten this apartment in the first place. She had always loved to bake, she loved making art out of sweets. She loved how much joy it could bring people, not just in the flavors but also in the beauty of it and she loved dedicating time to creating deserts that could move people. She daydreams of telling stories and sharing messages through flavors, and yet for the past few months she has struggled to be inspired by anything. She has had shit sleep and even shittier days. It is not so much that she had a shitty life but rather, she found herself bored and uninspired.

The only thing not micro in her apartment is her kitchen and she was happy to sacrifice space everywhere else in her life to make space for her craft; and in San Francisco you would have to sacrifice space or money for a kitchen like this. It is large, with professional stainless steel appliances and countertops, and has two large windows that let a lot of natural light flood in throughout the day.

The bitter aroma of fresh coffee pulls her out of her thoughts and back into the present where she serves herself coffee in her usual way, big mug of black coffee with a heaping spoonful of local honey. Looking back at the little black book on the island that she had been thus successfully ignoring, she decides to go over the pile of mail underneath it, a pile of mail she had been vehemently ignoring for days now.

She hadn't wanted to open her mail because she already knew there was no point. Normally she would excitedly skim her mail looking for an invitation to a pastry or confectionary competition but even if she were to get an invite, what would she create?

Realizing this she puts the mail back down and picks up the little black notebook. Turning it around in her hands she decides it looks like any other normal notebook, very similar in fact to the notebooks she uses to sketch out her designs and jot down recipe ideas and flavor profiles. That being said, there is something that feels different about this one, and not in a tangible way. It feels as though it is hiding something and while that should give her caution, she finds herself more drawn to the book because of it.

Taking a sip of her coffee, she puts the notebook back down and flips the front cover open, only to gasp and drop her mug spilling coffee all over the kitchen island. She quickly scrambles to cleanup the mess and stare in awe at the butterfly painted on the first page of the notebook. It is not just any butterfly, its the butterfly from her dream. It is the butterfly she tried so hard to grasp but just could not keep up with.

The more she takes in the vivid colors and design of the butterfly the more she seems to get lost in it. Soon she feels as though the colors in the butterfly's wings are moving. Its like the wings are made up of candy, but candy that is in the process of being made. It reminds her of how the colors of the candy change as you add dye and knead it through the candy before stretching it out to make it more elastic. Aida gets so lost in them that she doesn't notice the seam of the notebook starting to glow, and then, poof, she is gone.

She falls into the notebook, screaming along the way for inside the mysterious notebook she finds herself falls through cotton candy clouds towards a sparkly spring. As she breathes in to continue screaming she realizes that the air tastes like caramel popcorn and the clouds are actual cotton candy. The now too stunned to scream she looks around to take in her surroundings noticing a castle that seems to be made out of rock candy and pieces of rock candy coming out of the ground that looks like soft marshmallow.

And just like that Aida is again screaming as she realizes how close she now is to the ground, hoping it is in fact marshmallow that can break her fall. Thank fully she soon finds out she was right as she bounces her way down to a road seemingly made of cookies. Here she encounters bouncing candy canes that seem to be playing hop scotch.

"Excuse me, but can you tell me where I am?," she asks them.

"Your in the Land of Possibilities," They answer without bothering to look at her.

"The Land of Possibilities. Hmm," she says more to herself than anything. Then she recognizes a melody she vaguely remembers from a dream. It makes her want to dance which reminds her of the butterfly. She frantically searches for the source of the noise and decides to follow it. If the butterfly is here that means it brought her here somehow and it can lead her out, or at least she hopes as much.