what wisdom floats on the wings of a butterfly?

dear impulse, dear synapse, dear eyelids folding, 

There is a delirium that comes from tiredness. It is the feeling of wearing thin. A translucent layer of something existing between your pointer finger and thumb when the pads of the two are pressed together. 

When I was younger, I spent a lot of time thinking about reincarnation, and what that would mean. For some reason, I would often think about being a butterfly (I assume this choice came from some external influence but I can't remember what that could have been). In any case, I would think to myself How does it feel to be a butterfly? and then of course I would ask myself, How do butterflies feel? and then simply, Do butterflies feel? It was all very philosophical for a child, and I remember how it hurt my brain to think that way. I always wound up going in lazy circles (much like those lackadaisical spirals butterflies flutter about in on warm summer days).

I wondered if a butterfly would remember what it was like to be a human. I wondered how it would feel to know how to fly, while at the same instant remembering how it felt to have a body. The anatomical differences always seemed important to me. How could my soul, my self-awareness, be transposed to the body of a butterfly if I was, as a butterfly, not aware of my butterfly-ness. If, I thought, butterflies do not think in the same way as humans do, how would it process all of the memories remaining from when I was a human? And then, if my brain wasn't hurting enough already, I would think to myself about a nonlinear timeline. If time was circular, I supposed, then it was very possible that I was at that very instant, a butterfly and also not a butterfly. That I did in fact know what it felt like to be a butterfly because I was one. 

It's funny, because I have no proof of these memories. I have no way of guaranteeing that they are real, and not just fabricated memories of thoughts I wish I had had. It feels real though. As real as the butterfly wing I keep in an old eye cream jar that my aunt found in the attic. Maybe it’s just the tiredness making me think this way, folding back on myself again and again like origami paper made out of a cascading line of dominoes. I am always ebbing and flowing like the tide: reaching out into the world with my gentle feelers, tasting its sweet nectar with my long curly tongue, then reversing back into a chrysalis. Metamorphosis is cyclic. All that we are is all that we have been, and all that we will be we have been before.¹

To quote Diderot's Dream:

When is it going to start? I can’t wait.

It’s already started.

When?

Well, at the beginning.

But I thought it would be a dream.

The dream started long since.

1 The year is 2023. I’m editing and annotating my old letters in preparation for their rewelcoming to the world.

To bring in Faulkner’s famous quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”