ONLY MOTHS

We held our breaths. We held onto balloons until we couldn’t stand up. We couldn’t stop. We had to stop. We didn’t know better. It had to be better. We made it better.

We played with our mouths open until butterflies flew out. We knew they had the answers. We forgot the questions. Nothing was out of the question. We couldn’t decide. We made bad decisions. When the answers knocked, we were busy counting butterflies. We were busy being butterflies. We were.

We held each other up. We held ourselves up, with pills and powders and pizza left out on the counter overnight, ten of us in a room, fighting over the hardened cheese.

We could stop whenever we wanted to. We didn’t want to. We wanted change. We couldn’t change. We were too high. It was a conspiracy, we thought. They were listening, we were sure. We just weren’t sure who they were.

We had our limits, of course. No one talked to those of us who started shooting up. They didn’t stop. Why didn’t they stop? We stayed awake, hugging our knees and rocking. Some of us died. Some of us did. Some came back as shadows beside the bed in the middle of the night.

We were immortal. We flew. We crossed borders. We dared customs to dig through our purses, under our floorboards, in our tires. We binged and we disappeared. Those who got caught were jinxed, so we knocked on wood.

When we talk about it now, we say the butterflies were only moths. We say the sky was only blue. We forget. All we do is forget. All we want to do is to remember.

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Kirsten Whatley is a Hawaii-based writer whose work has been published by Tin House, Orion, River Teeth, AFAR, the Pacific writing anthology Ho‘olaule‘a, and elsewhere. She is the author of Preserving Paradise, a book about environmental volunteering in Hawaii, winner of a NATJA award. Lately, when she’s not writing, she can be found photographing very tiny things. @kirsten_whatley