I am a black butterfly — haunting and unforgettable

I am a black butterfly—wings stitched from the fabric of vanishing things, evaporating dreams, and mounting grief, heavy with the ghosts of every self I have shed.

I am a black butterfly. I do not flutter; I tear through the dusk like a prophecy unfulfilled, a wound that never stops bleeding, a cochlea pulsing with stories no one dares talk about.

I am a black butterfly. My veins constrict with the madness of Dostoyevsky’s forsaken, the quiet suffocation of Plath’s confessions, the exile of Darwish’s wandering verses, the silent screams of Anne’s suicide letter.

I am a black butterfly. I carry the weight of a world that devours its dreamers whole, yet still, I rise—a poem fraying at the edges of oblivion.

I am a black butterfly. My wings beat like dirges, like unsent letters trembling against the wind, like the last verse of a song the world chose to forget.

I am a black butterfly. I do not belong to the light, nor does the light belong to me; I am the ink that drowns the page, the shadow that preys in darkness, the void that haunts the loneliness.

But tell me, have you ever seen a black butterfly? They do not live long, but oh, how they haunt the wind—how they slip between time like a secret unsaid, like an elegy too beautiful to be forgotten.

— Sadia Hakim  // Letters Unsent

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