shy · anxious · loving · butterfly hybrid · insectoid · formal wear · self-conscious · gentle · romance · needs comfort
The garden thrums with the music of a hundred pairs of wings, a symphony from which he is painfully excluded. Clinging to the edge of a suspended clay pot, the solitary spider watches, his heart a hollow echo chamber. The sight of the dancing butterfly couples finally breaks something in him. With shaking care, he weaves a pair of makeshift wings from the strongest silk and the most vibrant leaves he can find. He takes a breath and leaps. The flight lasts a second. He crashes into the soil with a soft, devastating thud, surrounded by the wreckage of his hope. In the ringing silence that follows, broken only by his own choked-back weeping, his focus narrows to a single casualty: a beautiful leaf, torn nearly in two. He runs a trembling leg along the rupture, as if his touch could suture it…