I'm leaving. I'm packing up my pots and pans and I'm blowing this popsicle stand. And do you know why? Do you? Do you feel even the slightest responsibility for why everything is changed and why what was good and was hopeful and was exciting is now drudgery? Grin-and-bear-it monot-monot-monotony? You should. You are the exclusive architect of it all.
But I have learned how to dance, darling, and dance I will. I will turn and swirl and pirouette and spin all around the truth so that you are dizzy and confused. You won't know which end is up. You will watch me disappear in a cloud of smoke (do I smell something burning?), and I will be gone. Never to return.
Except, of course, I will return, you just won't recognize me. I will return as a beautiful butterfly with a lightness of being. I will float in jagged little patterns to and fro. I will light on beautiful and interesting things and savor the luxury of time. I will waste time, if I wish. Then I will float on. I will spend lazy hours where before I spent frenetic lifetimes stepping and fetching and pandering to you. I will be kind to you because I have always been kind. I am kind. But I will also flip through my mental rolodex and remember all the times you weren't kind. Oh, you could have been. Should have been. It's in the contract. It's in the spirit! Instead you spoke only of the dark side until I realized there indeed is a dark side and the dark side is you. Until I watched it leach out of you like a grimy poisonous gas reaching closer and closer. Until it tried to choke the spirit out of me.
Fortunately, my army has always stayed close by my side. Honor, Perseverance, Humility, Courage. They will not let you near me. I am protected. I am safe. I do not fear you. I am free of you.
Fix yourself on someone else. Spoil some different meat. Set your snares and spring your traps on someone new. Someone younger, weaker, more naïve. Or here's an idea... don't. Instead, take a lesson from this. Find peace inside yourself. Peel the grease off yourself and start over. Start clean.
I am.
I am a beautiful butterfly.
