When my daughter totters to me for the first time, I’m delighted. But at the Butterfly House, I realise she can walk away too. The butterflies make a fluttering rainbow tiara on her flowered hat and she shrieks with delight, placing them on her chest like brooches, a red lacewing right across her heart, and I want to cocoon her in this moment always, the wonder of the world gleaming in her iridescent eyes, but when I look down, the floor is a carnage of crushed butterfly wings, a red-orange-blue bloodstain, and I realise anything this delicate cannot last forever.
Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne to make sense of her experiences, both beautiful and traumatic. X: @pleomorphic2.