I used to pin butterflies to corkboards: arresting flight, staying beauty. “At least you waited until they were dead,” a college boyfriend remarked, eyebrows raised. I mumbled something about Nabokov, but really the butterflies were just a symptom. The point of it was to stop everything, to freeze and fossilize my life in a collection of train tickets and movie theater passes and business cards from restaurants I returned to and museum tickets from museums long dead and Post-It notes you left on my fridge. They filled scrapbooks and flaked like skin cells. I wanted time to stop, to crystallize. But in making of my life a film still, I forgot that film rots when exposed to daylight. And by now the reel of my memory has been bared to years and years of destroying glow. Overexposure eats your face like white leprosy—features snowed out, blurred and obscured by the blinding light—all your expressions now so lucent I can read myself through them. But maybe that was the point. Maybe the crystallization, too, was just a symptom. Maybe you were only ever a thin mirror, a glass to see myself in—and how revealing a glass you were, how easily you always cut me.
About the Author
Amy DeBellis is a disabled writer from New York. She is the author of the novels All Our Tomorrows, Methuselah, and The Widening Gyre. Her short fiction and nonfiction have been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net, have appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, and can be found in X-R-A-Y, Uncharted, Passages North, Write or Die, Trampset, Pithead Chapel, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and others. Follow her journey at www.amydebellis.com.
