Sometimes I wonder why I bother- with this, with the webpage, with everything. Not often, but sometimes. I do realize that half my problem is that I don't try hard enough, though that has always been true for me, of everything.

I may say that I would still do all this if no one read it, but I do wonder if that is truly true. If my loyal fans (both of you *smile*) were to abandon me, what would I do?

Sometimes (more often than not), I wonder if I don't try anymore because I did try, in the past, and always failed (it hurts to be ignored, it hurts so much sometimes that you just don't know what to do but turn your face the other way and pretend it never happened). Did I stop speaking because no one ever answered, or did no one ever answer because I never said anything?

I tried raising butterflies, once. My best friend had ordered caterpillars, and I used to watch as they crawled around in the little plastic cup, wondering in the back of my mind how exactly they would grow wings. Oh, of course I knew the whole metamorphosis spiel- and I didn't question it. It's only now, looking back, that I question, and wonder. After my friend's butterflies emerged from their cocoons and fluttered around and died, I asked for some of my own. Little brown-green caterpillars, creeping over mounds of dirt in a little plastic cup.

Butterfly cocoons, however full of the magical potential of life and all that crap, are still fundamentally boring objects. They hang there. Maybe they swing back and forth when you take the lid of the cup and move it into the mesh butterfly dome, but that's about it. When the butterflies finally emerged, I would reach my hand into the dome and they would sit on my fingers and stick out their long, curling tongues. Butterfly kisses? Nah. I think they were just hungry and confused. They tickled, though.

One day I didn't close up the dome all the way when I'd taken out some of my butterflies- unlike the dozens of fish that I'd had, I never named them. Or, if I did, I can't remember anymore. The next morning, there were only two of my five butterflies left in the dome- the rest had escaped, into my room, into the house, into the aether- maybe a week later I found one of them, clinging to the blinds. I put it back in the dome. I found the others, too, though I really only clearly remember that one, standing sidways on the blinds. It must have stared out the window at the sunlight- and I put it back in it's white mesh dome. One of the others was found under my dresser, in the dust, I think.

When they all began to die and turn into little painted lady butterfly corpses, my friend's mother told me that I'd have to pin them quickly, or else they'd close up on themselves. I didn't pin them, but I kept two or three of the bodies. I'm not sure why- I gave one of them to my cousin, when she came to visit. The others were swept away in the trash by my mom, when she came to clean my room one day. Bunches of butterfly corpses, curled in on themselves, swept away in the trash.