Lord of the Butterflies

by Andrea Gibson

But then I met you and I started feeling myself open, started feeling my yes coming back, the reverse of being haunted, like taking a deep breath and pulling the fog off the glass. My love, my yes, do you know how many times a day my gratitude frames your autograph?

Come be everything you are, my love.

but we treat panic, anxiety, terror as the failings of uncourageous minds who haven’t sipped enough chamomile tea or haven’t tattooed Namaste onto the right part of their windpipe or haven’t picked enough lavender from their herb gardens to rub into their pussy chakra.

Do you ever feel like the best of you is something you’re still hoping to grow into?

DEPRESSION [VERB] 1. to put on your best outfit and feel like you’re dressing a wound.

I think the hardest people in the world to forgive are the people we once were, the people we are trying desperately to not stir into the recipe of who we are now.

But no one heals what they refuse to look at. So when asked if I think you’re a good person, I say, I don’t believe in good people. I believe in people who are committed to knowing their own wounds intimately.

at some point it hit me: You and I are always going to fight for love. I am always going to drag my heart into the ring to call you the knockout I’ve been waiting for my whole life. You are always going to trigger me into rifling through my history until every ghost is hunted out. Every fight we have ever had has been an opportunity to unbruise the past. What hurt would we still be hoarding in our garage had we never fought about your inability to park a car because the GPS stops telling you what to do when you pull into a driveway?

The heartbeat is actually the sound made by the heart valves closing. If you, my love, ever hold a stethoscope to my chest, I will tell you to listen for the silence in between. What is and what will always be yours is the sound of my heart finally opening.

LIVING PROOF I have a few happy friends. I ask them about being happy the same way my high school friends ask me about being gay, So, what do you people do exactly? How do you do IT? Their answers are never as freaky as I would hope. Almost always they answer god or booze. One I don’t tolerate. The other, I’m told, doesn’t tolerate me. I’m fascinated with this idea of getting high on life. I imagine people on their backs in lilac fields snorting the lines the planes leave in the sky, waking with honeymoons in their bloodstreams. Me, I often feel like I’m the vaccine for goosebumps. I can’t remember the last time someone commented on my sunny disposition. That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to juice the sun for every holy drop. No one stands by passively while their joy gets lost in the dark. I know it is its own injury, spending too much of your life just holding yourself together— I’ve known that since the first time I tried to die: I was too ashamed to go back and get the stitches out on time so they scarred as badly as the wound. It’s the one part of me I never stop thinking ugly—twenty tiny holes framing a would-be flatline I still can’t look at without seeing the light going out in my best friend’s eyes while she watched the doctor’s needle close the letter I swore to never send.

My straight friends tease me because all my best friends are my ex loves, but a wise heart told me it’s the most tender part of queerness—how we’ve all lost so much family when we find people we call family, we’ll do almost anything to not let go. Thank goodness