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Some wanted the freedom to be anyone they wanted, some of us wanted the freedom to be left alone.
Beauty loses its meaning when you’re surrounded by too much of it.
“Not entirely accurate. Let’s call me a shadow child, overlooked rather than broken. I’m the teddy bear gathering dust bunnies under the bed, not the one-legged soldier.”
As a group, all our behaviors were learned from other Butterflies, who had learned it from other Butterflies, because the Gardener had been taking girls for over thirty fucking years.
“Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”
Every time the Gardener came, we all worried that she’d end up in glass, but that simple sweetness was something he seemed to treasure. That simple sweetness meant you could go to her, bawling your eyes out, and she’d hug and stroke and make silly sounds until you stopped crying; and she’d listen to you pour your heart out, without saying a word. For those girls, being around Evita’s sunny smile always made them feel better. For my part, being around Evita just made me sad, but when the Gardener came to her, she came to me, and she was the one person whose tears I could always forgive.
Here the girls and I sat face-to-face and knee to knee, and it was usually easy to pretend there were no Butterflies. The suck-ups had the wings marked around their eyes like Carnevale masks, but even then, in the misty dimness of the cave, it was easy to think it a trick of the shadows. We’d take our hair down, put our backs against the rocks, and there were no fucking Butterflies. Just for a few moments.
“My secrets are old friends; I would feel like a poor friend if I abandoned them now.”
I didn’t remind myself of them, didn’t strain to keep them in my memory, because they were indelibly written there.
He called us Butterflies, but really we were well-trained dogs.
and I thought how fucking unfair it was that he made us butterflies, of all things. Real butterflies could fly away, out of reach. The Gardener’s Butterflies could only ever fall, and that but rarely.
Butterflies are short-lived creatures, and that too was part of her reminder.
At the heart of the Garden, though, was loneliness and the ever-present threat of shattering, and connecting with the others seemed the safer of two evils. Not the lesser, necessarily, but the safer.
But my wings couldn’t move and I couldn’t fly, and I couldn’t even cry. All that was left to me was the terror and the agony and the sorrow.
He had his father’s eyes, but he was much more self-aware than the Gardener would ever be. The Gardener clung to his delusions. Desmond eventually confronted the hard truths, or at least the beginnings of them.
When it comes right down to it, though, we’re afraid.” “Of freedom?” “Of what happens if we almost get there.”
If you don’t look at the bad thing, the bad thing can’t see you, right?
“The gifts we give say as much about us as the gifts we get and keep,”
My keeping it just meant that she was important to me.
But each time I saw it, I knew I was in the presence of something extraordinary, something that not everyone found or was capable of recognizing and sustaining.
