What if butterflies smoked?

Here is a story I wrote the other day instead of my essay on our engagement with fictions. I don't think that my tutor would appreciate it though.

Every story I write for some reason features people doing weird things with cigarettes. I thought about why that is, and I realised that it's because I think they stand for all the the dark facets in humanity, their industry and their consumers.

Butterflies

They told me that I could never be like the “everyone”- they breathed it at my mother after they had cut her open to let me out. They implied it with furrowed brows when they listened to my troubles as I had paid them to do- but when I stood there finally unravelled and open like a wound, they closed their eyes and ignored it.
I do not like people. I find them too predictable and quaintly broken, forgotten to themselves and all the self-knowledge and control they could have if they would forgo the ego that keeps them moored in their predictable patterns. Makes them be a cliché, or a repetition, or worse; leave them stranded alone.
I went for too many years before my first attempt to draw myself out of this mess, wring myself out through my wrists. The adrenalin made laugh out loud when the blood began to squirt, and I pressed the razorblade side on against the slit to hide its snarly, spitting grin from me.
After I survived that, survived myself and the raging despondence, I grew calm and sealed.
Kia brought me coffee in the moonlight in a McDonalds, and she carried herself like she could fill your pockets with emeralds for no other reason than to make you forget about her. There was nothing in her that spoke or wanted to be heard: she was silent. Her silence was fierce and disconcerting, and the everyday seemed offensive and wild next to her. I came back each night for a month to watch her; cleaning the floors, saying “thank you, have a nice day”, checking the toilets for outrage. All the nuances that she had in her were laid bare in every minute and it was always just the one, or strange variations thereof: death. A nothing. An ANTI.
I knew her then, after the month. And she knew me, though we never spoke a word or made it the way it should have been. Followed the patterns of speech and recognition, eventual arrangements, wandering around together, engaging our natural responses to each other, wondering why she hadn’t rung then or kissed me then, then to one another until our habits blurred and made us attracted enough to want to be part of each other indefinitely and for nothing. It could all have been so predictable. But I was silent and she was silent, and in our shy glances and the lazy lick of her yellow gaze that didn’t speak or listen, we had done it all before and come to this.
“You can come out with me tonight”, she said on the my 31st visit to her work place. It was the first words we had spoken and they didn’t seem predictable or aware of that- she knew why I was there and had been for the month, what I wanted and that she would pass it on to me. A Chinese whisper that could make me dull and walled high inside my prison cell, a punishment more than a body, with a mind attached that reeled with constant wants that bored me.
I expected to follow her to an “out” that she had selected for us, a place outside of the ring of mutual recognition we had set onto ourselves. I must have misunderstood though, because I realised that she had meant out of the McDonalds only. Where I went after that was my choice, and I followed her through two misbegotten streets, parallels drawn between similarity upon similarity. She did not protest and I confess that it was the same old human hum that drove me- I wanted to know,and then by knowing own. Perhaps eventually even to conquer too, in the way that comes typical to a man.
We arrived at her door and she looked round at me at once distracted and unsurprised that I had followed her, but unlocked the door carefully while I watched. She stroked it roughly as if to calm a spooked horse before throwing it open, and dimly I was aware that this would produce fear in the everywoman, a strange man who followed them to their haven. But it was not fear exactly that lit her quick steps across the dark linoleum floor, it was an understanding that lay between stupidity and indifference, but more than anything I understood that she had no feeling of ownership in her, that the flat we moved in now could have been hers or mine or anyone’s thus holding no safety anyway.
She flew to the window, but didn’t turn on the lights. I looked around us to see grotesque shapes littering the walls, outlines of beasts and smudges of colour that made me sad to see so unexpectedly in the peace of the inky wallpaper. I heard the hiss of a match behind me and knew she had a lit a cigarette. “I do it though I don’t like it. When I smoke I am a smoker, when I am not smoking I am a non-smoker. It’s always a flip of a coin from one instant to the next which one it will be”. She breathed out slowly and loudly, pretending to savour it to herself.
“Why do you have nothing in your flat apart from those butterflies on the wall?” It was the first thing I had ever said to her after I’d woken to the sunlight. Last night raised itself from the murk of my memory like an imposing mountain, snow and ice framing its fierce peak- we had lain down together in the dark, in her bare living room, or what would be taken to be a room for living if someone did any living in it. I knew she felt the very name of that room irritated her, a nasty presumption “living room”, somehow a bumbling bully insensitive and unaware. I was sure she felt such things. She had smoked all night and stubbed out the cigarettes on the floor, the sparks going out like little meteorites.
She looked back at me after I had spoken, squatting on the floor and scooping all the ash from the night before into piles. She looked up at the walls undeterred in her action, and stared at the butterflies. Some were stencilled onto the wall, some were painted and some were stickers. But most were life-like, oversized ones made out of paper, intricately folded in parts, different colour paper mashee stuck down onto it. “I collect.” She said, “You can be that one.” I got up and walked towards the largest and most spectacular butterfly in luminescent green, following her index finger. There were scraps of unused paper lying on the floor below it, as if it had only just broken free of its cocoon, and the empty shards lay idly at my feet. “Thank you”.
I waited for the bus playing with the cigarette she had given to me just before our parting. We had not said anything, but I knew I would not be seeing her again. I had watched her silently scrape all the butts and ash into a little bird-feeder, snapping shut the cap like a coffin lid, and hang it from outside her window in clumsy determination as if mocking something else she should be doing. She kept her back to me for a whole eternity before I finally turned, galloped down the stairs and out of her front door, then onward past a children’s playground, lively and vulgar. Our story had already happened and ended, been forgotten, repeated – become boring. It didn’t matter to her that we were “soulmates”, like the stories promised, as it shouldn’t to me. It was just another trap into another useless riddle. But even though I understood the reasoning and felt all her thoughts exactly, I could not help but see that she was a little more ruined for the world than even I was. Though, I could surely follow her there, as I had out of the McDonalds.
I dropped her parting gift onto the sodden concrete, and looked up into the hooded face of a pubescent boy. He was gritting his teeth and rummaging around in his tracksuit pocket before he spat “Gimme your phone and your wallet, wanker, or you’ll fucking regret it.” He shook slightly with the vehemence of his threat, and if I had managed an aggressive enough display he probably would have balked. He would never had done it again. But as it was, I decided to write his life for him. Allow for the feelings of inadequacy, presumed quotidian exposure to violence, morbid curiosity and desperate need for any kind of interaction with someone who would respect and remember him, and his power. I gave all that to him without a fuss and grinned at him kindly. “Yeah, fuck off” he said, as he limped off forcefully, but I caught the unguarded seed of a smile spring into his eyes in response to mine. I watched him walk off with some silly trinkets of mine and gave him my oppression, boredom and sickness on his way. My destruction. He could have all that weight now and do his silly limp under the strain. The hoodie’s bleak future stamped his eyes shut, so he would not be able to understand anything, least of all himself. It was rare to see everything so clearly so as to suffer for it the way Kia does and I should. But I deserved to be that butterfly on her wall; sought, chosen, redeemed.
I crumpled my remainders like the cocoon down onto the concrete by the bus stop, empty and forgetting and got on the 123.