I was startled into remembrance just now. Looking out of my bedroom window, I noticed a flash of wings. A moth tore itself from the side panelling of the house and careened like a base jumper out into open air. 

This instance reminded me of a dream a had the night before. I wake up, from one blink to the next and forget what I was dreaming of only a moment before. But the moth’s wings snapped my mind’s eyes back to the dream, like a projector slide.  I saw a monarch butterfly brushing up through the air, soft as a ballerina’s skirts when she pirouettes. The orange of the wings were so bright and caught the sunlight within them  so that the butterfly seemed illuminated from the inside out, like the flipping of a coin. Twirling through air, winking in and out of luminescence. 

In the dream, I reached up to touch it, thinking of how they would all be dead soon and so I might as well touch one for the last time. While I still could.

When I was younger, our elementary school classes would take field trips to the coastal state park “Natural Bridges”, famous for the seasonal monarch migrations. The eucalyptus would be draped like the earlobes of a rich old lady with monarchs. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, all vibrant and clustered together. 

But over the years the colonies of monarchs have dwindled to precarious, barely existent numbers. Children still go to the state park, but I pity them. They have no idea how many there used to be in comparison to their paltry experience. Things like that always make me want to cry. 

Sometimes when I was a kid, they would float down like drifting leaves, wings allowing them to hang on the sea breeze, until they landed like snow drift on our coats and hair. We’d shriek from joy, our mouths open in childish glee. Like we were chosen especially by them, as if they knew us.

Reaching up in the dream, I hoped the butterfly would land on me, that old joyful feeling right on the edge of banking into me, like a skater on the rim of a deep pool. But when my fingers skirted over the wing, the butterfly seemed to curl up into itself, wings beating frantically. Its wing looked broken, bent in on itself. 

“I hurt it,” I hear myself murmur, anguished. 

“They’re too fragile, sometimes,” my dad’s voice intones from somewhere in the background. 

“But there aren’t that many of them left and this one–I killed it, didn’t I? It’s probably going to die now…” My voice gets smaller with each word. 

The dream ends shortly thereafter.