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Valentina stormed straight to the parapet. She grasped the concrete with all the strength her hands and fingers could muster. She hung her head. As her fingernails dragged across the rough surface, noise of the ensuing chaos behind faded away. The unfortunate commotion was pushed to the back of her mind, no longer detectable by any of her senses. She kept her head low in silence for a considerable time. It had been a trying few days; weeks now that she thought of it. Hell, the last few years had been barely manageable. Her mind spiraled at all she had weathered in that time. She always prided herself in being a fighter, never letting anything get her too morose. Resilience was the name of her game. 

“Game”, she thought, as her hands clenched even tighter. “If it were a game, some of this would be fair. But what does fair even mean? Someone loses their job for no reason, another gets a bad diagnosis in the face of a healthy lifestyle, still another, no matter how hard they try can’t catch a break in their career. People are born into poverty with little chance of ever rising above it. People are born… all kinds of ways.” The thought lingered, flapping like a damp cotton sheet pinned to a clothes line. One tear escaped her golden eyes but she quickly wiped it away with a scoff. As she did, something else golden caught her piercing gaze- a butterfly. 

Flitting along in the wind, seemingly without a care, very far above and away from any bit of nature, a single monarch butterfly. Her eyes followed it as it flew up and up until it disappeared from sight. Valentina turned around to confront the car collision which still lie behind her.

Getting a ride back to the city from the tow-truck driver, who was more than a little bit intimidating, she let her mind again drift from her circumstance. It landed on her younger years. More specifically her friends from her younger years. She hadn’t taken time to realize how she missed them. How long had it been since she’d seen everyone- how long had it been since she’d seen anyone? 

“It’s just a car,” the driver blurted out unexpectedly. “No one wants to hear it in these types of situations but its important to keep in mind. You’re lucky. No one got hurt, just some hunks of metal twisted up.” 

He was right, Valentina did not want to hear it right now. But still, he was right. “I mean… yeah… it just…” Val responded in defeat.

“Look, I towed countless wrecks away from accidents. I seen some not great things. This is just metal and some money. You need to get a ride to work? That is if you’re lucky enough to be working right now, call a friend, that’s what they’re for. You lucky enough to have friends? Count it. You not that lucky? At least you live in a city- we got rideshares. You don’t got enough money for that, we got pretty great public transportation going on. All’s I’m saying is,” he unprovokedly continued, “I know it sucks, but money, that comes and goes- if it wasn’t on this it’d be on something else. That’s life. That’s part of this game.”

“Game, he said game,” Val thought to herself, recalling recent thoughts. Now more engaged in the conversation she continued, “You’re right. It is just a car and I am okay, and the other driver is okay… and with it taking place on a bridge… it could have been terrible.” 

“There ya go, kid,” the driver encouraged her. 

Now alone in her apartment, the freedom of her car removed, Valentina felt alone. Too alone. She went for a walk. Her apartment complex was very near a dense part of the city, but fortunately it had a grove of trees in a field behind it. This was a curious fact for the value the land held. She had learned the original owner stipulated its preservation and maintenance upon the complex’s sale. An obvious labor of love, a small figure eight path had been cut through the trees for tenants of the apartments to enjoy. The figure eight was a beautiful unbroken infinity loop, save for one foot path that had been carved at its western edge leading away from the trees. 

Where once stood a large industrial building now lay only dirt and rubble. But the reason for the break in the path was what lay beyond that rubble- a pristine lake with no land to be seen beyond it. Valentina sat down in the grass and peered out over the rubble and across the water. She thought about sending a message to one of the friends she had reminisced over earlier, but decided instead to savor this moment. She let her shoulders relax and spread her fingers wide on the ground beneath her, feeling the texture of the evening grass. She looked down toward her right hand and saw a dandelion puffball which she instinctively plucked. 

Childhood memories swiftly flashed through her mind, iridescent and whimsical as a carousel. She closed her eyes for a brief moment. Upon opening them she gently blew against the dandelion scattering its seeds into the soft, evening wind. She watched some fall within sight and some take flight until they disappeared, off to new horizons, just as the butterfly had done earlier. She contemplated their differences. The butterfly beginning as a ground-shackled, unassuming creature. The dandelion beginning as a beautiful bright spot of yellow. She cried. 

These appendages of the natural world experienced things completely differently. The tear wiped away previously, returned. Along with others which streamed down the cracks of a widening smile. “Life happened to them. As it does to all of us,” she thought to herself. What it held for them both was change- drastic, beautiful change. They had very different ways of getting there, but they both learned, in time, to fly.  

“But which one am I,” she demanded aloud. “Am I the dandelion- at the end of my brightest days?” She’d barely thought the entirety of the sentence before she was attacked, from all sides, by the problems of her life. The thoughts assured her those days were indeed behind. “No.” She silenced them. “I choose butterfly; my brightest days are still ahead,” she sternly declared. “I am in chrysalis,” she exclaimed; suddenly and unexpectedly recalling a high school biology term which denoted the time a caterpillar spends in its cocoon. “That is what I am deciding. I can’t control everything that happens in my life, but I can control my reaction to it. My perception of it. Just like the flower, just like the butterfly- they both went through extreme, but natural stages. If I had been that little caterpillar I would have been scared to death of everything that was happening to me. But because of it, not in spite of it, and not without it, what wonder I can become.” The heaviness of her thoughts dissipated as whimsy danced in her golden eyes witnessing the waning sun. “To learn to fly, I have to let life happen,” was the last thought she had before she got up from the grass to go telephone her friend.