Our Butterfly
8:38 a.m. My bus rolls into New York—the greatest city in the world, a wonderful fusion of marinara sauce and Indian spice and Chinese steamed bao. It’s here that dreams become reality, and with mile-high skyscrapers and a Chanel at every intersection, it’s nothing like home.
I’d wake up to Ma frying her trademark breakfast, fluffy blueberry pancakes with burnt home fries that she demanded we eat clean because food was precious. But not once did she fail to feed us, for she made certain the house was always supplied.
Ma had named me after our shabby little town, and I was always ashamed of it. Bitter sandstone dust and the lame Yosemite gift shop were the only things people remembered. Come again, the sign leading to Route 140 read. No one ever did.
But New York is a hub of perpetual movement. I glance at my watch, the screen cracked with old memories. It’s 10:02 a.m and I’m right on time: the venue’s massive, the size of three houses plus two lawns back home. It’s hairspray and freshly roasted coffee, cold light and a gently-lit stage, commanding barks that dictate yet yield no attention.
11:59 a.m. One minute. Remember when Kinsale and I played dress-up every day at noon? We’d put the boa constrictor around our necks (a real dead snake, our hometown’s specialty) and strut around in Ma’s worn-down high heels from college, slipping on her broken sunglasses as if we were rich. After Kinsale left, Ma begged me not to go. But God and America were calling. Trust me, Kinsale had said. Take a chance for once. You’ll make it big.
Wings. That’s what my costume is called. Not the glitzy silver ones Victoria’s Secret Angels wore, but the wings of a real butterfly—the Euphaedra janetta, painted metallic sapphire and emerald and gold just like those that would perch on our windowsills seconds before flying into the fading periwinkle dusk, taking advantage of the precious last sliver of daylight. 2,963 miles away, I know Ma’s shaking her head in disapproval. But still, I hope she’s proud: I have so much to send back, so much I can now properly repay.
Flocks of pigeons and passersby flood the ever-bustling intersection of 5th and 18th. It’s hard to recognize anyone here: New York’s a game of lost and found, where things vanish as easily as they have appeared, where home feels so close, yet so far. I fumble for the sunglasses Ma gifted me for Christmas years ago, the knockoff Ray-Bans I loved donning during dress-up. She’d been so proud, having fixed them with her bare hands.
Immediately, the world before me’s rusted with a sepia-tinted haze, a ’90s vignette of a California that had never left. A familiar face holds an oh-so-familiar set of eyes that dart back and forth, forever searching. I want to tell her so badly that she can stop now because I’ve made it. Look, I’m here. Look, it’s me, I whisper.
It’s Mariposa! Your butterfly.
by JOY GONG