Broken. That's the only way to describe him. A husk of his former self, the cocoon of a butterfly, but the butterfly was nowhere to be found. Oh how beautiful it would be, wings outstretched, flying from flower to flower. In someone's garden maybe, a Picasso of flowers so elegantly put together by someone who loves nature as much as he does. But that is just a dream. He is just the cocoon. Ugly, grey, dead, an empty shell of beauty.

He was happy once, but it was only a false happiness. A girl he would daydream about, write letters to that Hemingway would be jealous of. It was love, that much he could be sure of, but very imperfect. An imbalance of mental disorders combined with a distance gap, it was a cacophony of insanity and beauty. There were happy times, but they've faded into the twilight hours of his memory. The rising sun of hatred blinds him, and has turned him into the cocoon.

Now he longs to get away from it all. Move on from his tortuous past, and into the prime of his life. He has college ahead of him, new girls to meet, new friends to make. But there is unfinished business with his soul that he must fulfill.

There is only one place he can go where his heart feels at ease, the wilderness. They are mostly tamed nowadays, at least the ones near where he lives. Long overturned by desperate men in search of glittering flakes of false hope that they believed would save them and their families. The beautiful world that the native peoples such as the Creek once called their home was now a shell of its former self, but shells still contain beauty if you look hard enough.

Checklist complete, Backpack packed, he slings it over his shoulder. It would be a long journey. A small note is all that he left:

“You know where I am, and why I have to go. There is no need to worry, I will be back when I am ready”

As the pencil left its last traces of graphite on the curved Y, a tear found itself on his lower eyelid. He closed the door to the friendly house that he had called his home for the past 7 years of his life. But most people move, he was just moving into the seemingly infinite neighborhood of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Thumb pointed behind his shoulder he made his way onto the main road. A butterfly flew past him, beautiful wings, blue the color of Neptune with black patterns snaking across, almost outlining it. He watched it land on a pink flower, maybe its home, but no one could know for sure. Oh how he longed to be that butterfly, but alas, he was just an empty cocoon.