A nightly visitor

I was up late reading last night - this has become a habit lately - when a beautiful visitor suddenly drew my attention. My reading was lit by a desklamp - my wife was sleeping in the same room; she could not sleep with the lights on - and its soft, yellow glow had attracted a butterfly. It was not a moth, I am sure, but a small butterfly, white of colour, with beatifully drawn thin green lines on its tiny airy wings. The lines formed a pattern that was divided between the wings in perfect symmetry. The butterfly sat still on my desk, as if warming its back in the lamp light. I thought that it had probably gotten in during the day as I recalled my wife's words about a butterfly that had somehow made its way inside, although the window net had been tightly closed. "Maybe it was afraid of the rain," she had said.

There was something strange in this butterfly, some weird calmness one does not usually expect of an insect in the vicinity of a night lamp. It was sitting with its back to me, its beautiful little wings fully exposed, resplendent in the light. It was as if the butterfly sat there to draw my eyes upon itself, to make me aware of its presence in the room. I could see its tiny black eyes, no bigger than pinheads, reflecting the lamp - it appeared the butterfly was also watching me.

I have never been a superstitious man, neither have I taken mysticism too seriously. But I believe that even diehard materialists must have second thoughts in their lives, so I was not too unwelcoming to a strange idea that visited my mind out of the blue. To be precise, it was rather a recollection of a weird hypothesis I had read about somewhere long time ago. It said that the souls of late relatives, or loved ones, sometimes came to visit those still living in the disguise of nocturnal insects: moths, or butterflies. At the time I had liked the hypothesis, although never believed it; the resemblance of a specter to a light-coloured nocturnal flying insect with airy wings had seemed quite plausible - and reasonable - to me. After that, for a short period of time I had become mindful of butterflies, moths and other flying insects inside the house. But this was a long ago experience, and I had comfortably forgotten the whole thing, buried it deep cobwebs of my memory, well until the last night encounter.

A warm feeling arose deep inside me as I observed the butterfly. "Mother, is that you?" - I thought. And waited for a reply, believing, for a moment, that the butterfly would answer me. And had it answered, I would have not been surprised too, as I think about it now. Over my head, one the bookshelf, was my mother's photo in a frame as white as that butterfly's wings. The photo was taken on the day I saw my mother for the last time; she was seeing me off on a long journey, I was hugging her with a happy smile. I didn't dare to look up at the picture. I simply knew that my mother was smiling back at me, and I felt content with that knowledge.