Excerpt: Chasing A Butterfly

Guilt slithered into me through that familiar hole in my heart and made a grab at my mind, but I knocked it down the same way I did anyone who got in my way. No matter how hard it tried, I would not let it frame me in its burning furnace. I combated guilt with detachment, an icy chisel that slowly peels my lightning burns into flakes of apathy.

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No other eyes stripped me and lashed the hide and meat off my bones than my parents’ eyes. They probed me with a sharp needle that did not punch holes in my flesh, but deflated my heart.
If we had just stood there, if they had just pinned me with no words, for even a few minutes it would have been punishment enough.

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I wasn’t afraid of forgetting them. I had thought I lost my parents a long time ago to the coldness and loneliness of shadowed feelings, and I had already gone through that grief and suffering of the bereft in my rebellious ways. But I realized last night that they had never forsaken me. No, they had never stopped believing in me.
The truth was, I had lost myself.
That was more horrifying than anything.
I was blowing through the world like the empty cocoon of a caterpillar fallen off the stability of a branch, a vacant shell of no real substance. The butterfly was the real me, and it had flown off into the endless sky.