Butterflies

It is easy to see how it all began, back in those warm summer fields with the haze all around us. I remember butterflies everywhere. The grass was fresh green, moist with dew in the mornings. You could get your shoes and the bottoms of your trousers wet in the space of a few yards.

Later, around midday and into the afternoon, the grass would be dry and warm, so soft, moulding itself to you as you lay there. Of course, you were there, and your nakedness suited the landscape.

I remember how you once said that clothes, in that meadow, made you feel clumsy and separate. Perhaps that was mankind's first act in cutting himself off from nature, putting a layer of dead emptiness between him and the world he should be part of; not standing separate, removed, as though there is not, and there never has been, a connection between them.

I remember how you could sit, just watching the butterflies dance, as though nothing really mattered.