When the worms start to eat my stomach,
they find only rotting butterflies-
once alive, trembling with color,
now folded into dust and silence.
They say the body remembers what the mind refuses,
so I must have swallowed something fragile
the moment I first saw her-
something that beat too fast to survive inside me.
There were wings where there should have been hunger,
fluttering in the dark like unfinished thoughts,
each one a version of me
that never learned how to land.
I thought love would feel like light,
but it arrived like weather breaking skin,
soft at first, then everywhere-
until even my bones learned its name.
Now I lie still while time unthreads me,
and the worms, patient as memory,
find only what I could not bury properly:
a garden turned inward,
petals that forgot how to bloom outward,
and all the colors I mistook for forever
quietly dissolving in the dark.
And still-
somewhere beneath it all-
a butterfly moves,
not alive, not gone,
just waiting for a sky it can no longer remember