Crying Shape.
Something changed in Lu under that sofa. She crawled out and looked at Bob, who was licking off the crumbs from the floor – an action Lu always found perplexing, as she could never connect it with his otherwise flawless demeanor. He looked exactly the same as before, yet Lu wasn't fully recognising him. She stood there in the middle of the living room, wearing prolonged silence and practicing non-movement. Butterflies in her mind were quiet, and she didn't rush to send in the usual agents, doubt and fear, to wake them up.
In that moment Lu only could feel one, her usual companion, a butterfly born with impaired speech called Rachel.
Rachel was special, mostly because she couldn't speak and yet was responsible for the direction of many of Lu's movements.
Lu had a soft spot for her and almost always followed where Rachel wanted to go. Every place she showed to Lu became an adventure, not just a fleeting fun but a real one. This flawless pattern, established a solid connection between "goodness" and "Rachel" in Lu's brain.
Because Rachel could not speak, unlike other butterfly-thoughts, it was impossible for Lu to know exactly why Rachel wanted to go where. Possibly non of of them had an idea about what was luring them, and perhaps that peculiar circumstance was responsible for the adventure to take place.
Most of the time, Rachel was fluttering her wings inside Lu's mind, trying to call her attention, but due to the constant chatter of others, Lu had troubles hearing her. She followed the voices that were more explicit in their desires, and often, they led her to underwhelming places. By the time Lu would arrive where the stubborn butterfly had brought her, the trace of that flying creature would fade away, leaving Lu feeling out of place and not knowing why she was there in the first place.
Many times, Lu promised herself to wait before chasing loudmouthed butterflies and look for Rachel, but 9 out of 10 times, Lu was religiously running behind the voices in her mind.
Something changed when she met Dot, an opiniated owl who lifed in the shadows behind words.
Since than her fear of dark silence softened its grip and Rachel got more chances to be noticed. Lu observed this shift and created a hypothesis that other butterflies found Dot's, silence, and the shadows a little boring and maybe even intimidating. Dot didn't seem to react to their chatters and they felt a little insecure about themselfs.
Most of the buterflies could not see in darkness, it was limiting their movements. They were using words to bounce of surfaces that helped them to locate in space. They had to slowdown and couldn't help but fall asleep. Lu thought that they secretly wanted to fall asleep where the movement was possible again, even if it was in their dreams. Sometimes she thought they were pretending they couldn't see to avoid difficulties and escape into their comforts. But she didn't know for sure, all of it was pure speculation inside of Lu's mind facilitated by the same buterflies.
Rachel, on the contrary, seemed to love Dot, the shadows behind words, and the silence. Lu guessed that nothing was limiting Rachel her movements. Because there were no words, no directions or boundaries, were possible to locate. Rachel wasn't bumping into other butterflies, and everything was possible.
Lu herself also experienced words as constraints, similar to the traffic signs spread over the wild roads of her inner landscape. These alien signs called words were spread all over her mind, reducing endless possibilities for things to exist by defing what is what, when and how.
Deep down, Lu didn't think there was something intrinsically evil about words; they were on good terms. For most of her life, she loved them deeply, and they were only reliable companions who would listen and respond to her thoughts. These days, Lu was becoming slightly suspicious about words, though.
One day, she was browsing through one of the cheesy magazines and came across an article skillfully explaining what toxic relationships were. The convincing voice of the author was announcing 10 signs to detect if you might be stuck in one.
Lu looked at it with her full attention, replacing every "partner" with "words." She did check out a few boxes but didn't get enough score to confirm her hypothesis.
"It is not toxic; it is just complicated," she concluded, carrying slight disappointment. Firstly, because Lu didn't manage to find belonging to a category described in the article. And secondly, because she missed a chance to find a victim bot outlet where she could complain about the inescapable misery of her life where she is held hostage by words which held her back from taking responsibility for her own life.
Lu quickly forgot about it, though, as she moved to a new page where the author, in seemingly convincing manner, was giving a list of 10 signs you are in a twin-flame relationship. Lu didn't know what it was, but the name was capturing her desire to belong to whatever that might be. Lu liked that list much better, and replacing "partner" with "words" fitted perfectly to the relationship she had with language.
She took out a pen and her beloved notebook, that had seen a lot, and decided to make her own list.
Lu tensed her forehead, activating the triangle of sadness, an area between Lu's eyebrows. She wore it each time when the time to produce something deep was coming. Lu always explained this involuntary activation of her muscles as internal breaks, keeping her from accelerated movement downwards into the rabbit hole of her mind.
She placed a pen on the white sheet, spotting its silent virginity forever.
"What are we becoming: experiential evidence of my twin flame relationship with language or yet another hopeful attempt to label my relationship with language.
Boundless Dance with Words: Words and I, a perpetual waltz in the ether, where syllables pirouette in a cosmic ballet of boundless expression.
Surreal Ink Alchemy: Words, not mere vessels, but alchemical agents transmuting my thoughts into surreal hues on the canvas of existence.
Harmony in Haunting Echoes: Language echoes through the corridors of my soul, a haunting melody that resonates with the profound cadence of existence.
Rebel Verse Symphony: In the rebellion of phrases, a symphony unfolds, an anarchic sonnet that defies the shackles of conventional expression.
Luminous Abyss Exploration: Language, an abyss of luminescent mysteries, invites me to plunge into its depths, seeking the elusive truths that shimmer in its poetic obscurity."
In about 30 minutes, Lu placed the pen, experiencing slight difficulty in doing so. Her palms got sweaty and sticky, as they were not ready yet to let go of writing. Lu noticed tension in her hand and emptiness in her mind. She had no idea what she wrote, the rapidity of her forgetting was remarkable. Lu rarely went to her writing, as if reading it back was less important. This time she decided to do the opposite, activating her dormant but not fully dead yet, oppositional defiant disorder, this time directed towards herself.
After running through the text a couple of times, stumbling upon syntactic obstacles and semantic detours, she sat in silence, hoping for Rachel to show her the way. Lu's external reaction was a surprise – open eyes and mouth stretching in an awkward smile, lifting corners of her eyes. But internally, her confronting guesses were laughing at her loudly, leaving no space for her to move away from the obvious.
Lu didn't understand a word of what she wrote. It didn't make sense and was lacking a soul.
"Auch, never read your words, Lu! Come on, girl! Stay only with your own reflection, don't look your twin flame in the eyes. It will crush you."
And so it happened. Butterflies went hiding behind each other's wings, and even Rachel was losing her tempo. Instead of Lu's usual duck and cover, her natural ODD and experiments with silence came in handy, pushing Lu to stay with the empty void that filled her chest, hosting all kinds of itches and discomforts.
Bravely and with her doubt slowly but steadily fading, Lu was standing in the middle of a space, which felt like a dislocated, non-spatial cloud, and didn't posses any features of an existent place. Her hands were sqeezed in fists, and teeth were pushing against each other, nutcracker style, catching Lu in a rather unattractive expression.
The ground where she stood on and her feet, formed a complete symbiosis, stealing away her ability to move. Lu was gazing straight ahead of her, facing a giant many-eyed figure without a defined shape. Covered with numerous blinking dots, that were asynchronously rotating in all directions, the shape was inescapable. Lu never saw it that well before; facing it was tormenting her from the inside. She knew the shape well, they first met when she was a child. Later through reading books, hearing other people and watching movies, Lu mapped it to self-embarrassment, a phenomenon that was most accurately aligning with her experience.
The Shape and Lu, stood in front of each other for a while. Time was dancing in confusing untrackable patterns, changing its tempo as it was wired to a random operator. No butterflies, no thoughts, no caterpillars – only Lu's shame and Shape's gazes.
Rachel was the first to move; her wings couldn't stay immobile for too long. Luckily, she had no friends who could support her and had to move to prevent falling. At first with slight hesitance, Rachel approached Shape. She chose a random eye to stare into and hung in the air for a while. A small drop showed up in the corner of the eye which softened Rachel who pulled out her tounge and licked the tear off.
Lu was observing this intimate and awkwardly disturbing movement, while feeling into the wave of adventure Rachel was opening up for her.
Suddenly Lu remembered that she had legs and made a step, then another one and another one. Rachel flapped her wings and moved to stare at the next eye, hopping from eye to eye, triggering rotation on the eyeballs and drinking tears from each of them.
It looked funny.
Suddenly Lu remembered that she had her face and it had a mouth, and the mouth could laugh. She exploded in loud laughter, instantly sending reminder notifications to each cell of her body, activating full remembering of the joy she could feel.
Shape was struggling to chase Rachel down and stop itself from releasing droplets of sorrow. Hopeful persistence of the Shape, combined with unrealistic expectations and their unequal forces looked cute and very lovable.
Lu wanted to approach the Shape and taste the tear as well but lost her interest half a way, deciding to follow Rachel who was heading towards a flickering light on the horizon.