Vanessa atalanta
Some names linger in strange ways.
Not because we choose them, but because they happen to carry several meanings at once. A name for something living. A name for something lost. A name that suddenly appears in a photograph and opens a door you thought you had closed.
In the image rests a Red Admiral, Vanessa atalanta.
Dark as the night, yet carrying enough colour to defy it.
It is not there for long. Butterflies rarely are. They arrive from nowhere, land in your world with a confidence that almost feels rude, show you their brief little splendour, and then they are gone again. Not because they are cruel. Not because they lie. But because some things never truly belong to the ground.
They belong to winds.
Distances.
Currents.
Oceans.
Perhaps especially the Atlantic.
There is something almost funny about that. A small butterfly with a name that carries both colour and ocean, while you stand on your side of the world trying to pretend that geography is only lines on a map. As if certain distances cannot pass straight through the chest.
But it was there.
That is what I keep returning to.
A brief moment on the cosmic timescale, yes. A flutter between two eternities. A few messages in the dark. A few dreams that sounded larger than life would later allow them to become. A touch of colour in a landscape that had been far too grey for far too long.
And then the wind.
Always that damned wind.
I do not think every beautiful thing is meant to stay. That sounds like something one says to comfort oneself, and perhaps it is. But that does not make it any less true. Some encounters are not houses to move into. They are phenomena of light. Rare, audacious, impossible to own.
You get to see them.
You get to love them.
You get to miss them.
Then you try to go on living without making the memory smaller just because reality became smaller than the dream.
So I let the butterfly be a butterfly.
I let it rest there in the photograph, with its red bands and white spots, like a small secret in broad daylight. It says nothing outright. It does not need to. Some things are clearest when they are not explained to death.
Vanessa atalanta.
A red admiral.
An Atlantic.
A wind-borne reminder that something can be brief, impossible, and still entirely real.
And somewhere, far beyond my shore, perhaps the same wind continues.