Three White Butterflies

On gratitude

I was on a date recently talking about God, and I was struggling to articulate what I meant, which is that filtering the Everyday through the forms of Beauty and the Good is enough for me to see the magic in most things, most of the time.

I think of these magic moments as the white butterflies Lana describes:

“God, if you're near me, send me three white butterflies,

Three white butterflies to know you’re near”

I see three white butterflies in the flush of my friends faces, around candlelight and a bottle of wine. They flit across my eyes in goodbyes, when fingertips pass me off from your hand to my front door.

“Happiness is a butterfly,

Try to catch it like every night,” Lana sings.

I remember laying on my back in the Atlantic Ocean, at eleven or some age like it, floating in sparkling salt water with my eyes closed, feeling a sense of peace I’d not yet known, and have never quite gotten back to.

I find shades of it in quiet moments. On a spring morning, cold white light streaming in through the window, waking up with someone else. Curled up in bed, cradling cups of coffee, discussing works of art.

I pull up one of my favourite paintings, the lovers on the swing.

“Look at her expression,” I say. “She’s everything, a little minx.”

“She does look cheeky,” my coffee mate replies. Three white butterflies in her eyes.

I wish on 11:11s, and I consider deeply who I saw in a dream the night before. I’m thinking of you, I say in my mind’s eye, I wonder if you’re thinking of me too. I’m not saying this isn’t delusional.

On sleepy mornings, for as long as I can remember, I’ve cast future dreams onto my bedroom ceiling. Laying on my back in bed, I stare up, picturing the scenes unfolding.

Here, I think about something that my cousin Kira once said, while we were on our way to a dinner party in the hills in LA.

We were in the back of a car winding up dark roads, and I was nervous, feeling anxious and self conscious. Squeezing her hand, my palm sweaty and pink, I said: “I don’t know why I’m panicking so much.”

“When I’m nervous on the way to something,” she replied, “I just send the people I’m on my way to meet some love. I close my eyes and think of them, and I send good thoughts.”

I tried this, eyes closed, soft breathing, feeling lightheaded and high on the goodwill of it. Her party trick.

And I remember being some other age like eleven, sitting at the dining room table with my grandparents during our daily after school card game.

“Good card, bad card, good card, bad card,” Papa would declare, dealing the deck with a wink. I never knew if he was trying to control the outcome, or if he was commentating on the way things go.

“You make a plan and God laughs,” my dad used to say.

It only gets better, I’ve thought for as long as I can remember, like a prayer. Something I deeply believe, and have seen come true time and time again, even when life feels like “it’s just shit,” as a bartender once said to me.

“The experiences you’ve had,” my mom said to me the other day while she was folding the laundry, shaking her head with a smile. I thought about everything that she’s ever wanted, and all of the things that I’ve gotten. Paris and London, New York and LA. Rumbling in the back of a car over the Brooklyn Bridge at 4 am, listening to a song I’ll never forget in my earbuds. Sipping a beer on the beach, sandy and tired and happy, watching the sun go down in Malibu. Laying flat on my back against the snowy ice at my friend Tess’s cottage, staring at the sky above, listening to the girls who taught me how to love laughing up ahead. Hotel rooms and white sheets and forehead kisses.

“What I’ve prayed for has always come true,” an old friend once said. I realized this recently, how all of the deepest desires materialize months and years later. Simmering hopes back of mind that come to fruition in time. When I see three white butterflies I say thank you, for the future dreams, the memories.