Simply Put, the Study of Butterflies: A continuation of The Morning After

It was a humid day in late June, six months since the “accident”. At least that’s what her obituary said. Cohen couldn’t convince himself to go to Ada’s funeral. Nothing seemed right; the fact that her mother desperately tried to cover up her seemingly perfect daughter’s suicide, the disgustingly fake funeral home and church service that proceeded a week later, and, going against Ada’s wishes to be cremated and have her ashes spread over a large body of water somewhere it was always warm, her burial in a wooden casket next to a deceased brother that passed in child birth three years before she was born. Ada was a free spirit, and Cohen couldn’t bear to see that personality trait of hers stifled by all this bull shit. But as he sat in the Starbucks near his home in Georgetown, surrounded by prep school students in their uniforms, he realized that nothing about Ada’s death mattered anymore. She was dead, she got what she wanted, and she was finally happy. Without another thought on the matter Cohen got up from the beat-up armchair, threw away his paper cup still full of untouched coffee, and stepped into the blinding summer sun.

Cohen skipped class that morning and went straight home. He somberly walked up the concrete steps to the town home door, and struggled to find his house key in his pockets while the sun beat down on his tan neck. Upon entering he went straight to the kitchen, but quickly lost the little appetite he had after seeing a distant father, dressed in an elegant suit with a black leather briefcase in hand, flirting with the recently hired and only mildly attractive maid that spoke little to no English. Hoping he hadn’t been noticed, Cohen walked up two short flights of stairs to his bedroom on the third floor and slowly closed the door behind him as he stepped inside. His eyes drifted to the small pile of collected items from Ada’s room that now occupied a large corner of his dresser.

Cohen heard of Ada’s death the afternoon after from some of her close friends that regularly talked about Ada behind her back and obviously took advantage of her naïve personality. Most of them sobbing into the phone to the point where he couldn’t make out anything they were saying regarding Ada’s jump from the roof of her own home. (No one knew Cohen had been up there on that rooftop with her the night before when disoriented and sleep deprived, he left her there upon request. And that on his way home that night, with a very light snow falling on his shoulders; he knew exactly what Ada was about to do, and with that thought in mind, kept walking anyway.) After he hung up amidst the sobbing of the seventh caller he headed straight to Ada’s house. Cohen let himself in using a spare key, went straight to her bedroom, disregarding an alarmed maid, and walked out only a moment later with a box of her belongings. The box was dumped out on his dresser and it’s contents had been there, untouched, for six long months.

Without thinking anything of it at the time, all of these objects directly related to Ada’s personality or a memory he had shared with her sometime during her short life. This pile included: collected items from flea markets and thrift stores, ranging from jewelry to geodes, that she purchased after long conversations with store clerks where she was always nothing less than fascinated by what they had to say (usually with an oriental accent), discoloured tarot cards that Ada used religiously. (It wouldn’t be surprising for Cohen to walk in on her sitting on her bed, white sheets strewn aside, surrounded by the cards in every direction), a single shoebox of photographs and Polaroid’s, the most memorable being a candid photo of Ada that Cohen took one summer at a local pool. (The photo itself was a close up of her face with bleached hair being blown into perfectly blue eyes and a small smile showing white teeth.), books filled with pressed flowers and leaves, covering everything from Hinduism to lepidopterology, or, simply put, the study of butterflies, and last, a collection of moleskin journals with no outer reference to what may lie inside. Ada’s seventeen years of life could be summarized by everything that lay on the dresser, secrets and all. She would have never had a problem with Cohen going through it (the two kept nothing from each other), but still, he would always catch himself, hand hovering over one of the journals, too afraid to pick it up. But that afternoon, as he stood over the belongings of a lost life, a flash of yellow colour caught the corner of his eye coming from the direction of the window. Cohen went over to the sill to find a bright yellow butterfly circling the empty space in front up it. He unlatched it and slowly lifted the window. After quick hesitation, the creature let itself inside and gently rested on his shoulder. Cohen admired it for a few moments before carefully placing it on his pointer finger and letting it go as he slowly mouthed the words, “Thank you Ada.” It clumsily flew up and over the roof in a matter of seconds. Leaving the window open, Cohen got up from where he was sitting, picked up one of Ada’s journals, and started to read.