I looked out the window for a total of 28 hours.
Mama didn't come to bring me to bed, so I stayed there, waiting. My hands turned purple in my mittens and my eyelashes hurt to blink, but I stayed.
The wind blew. And blew, and blew. I glanced out of the corner of my stiff eye at the indigo notebook by my side, fluttering pages filled with my charcoal scrawlings until it looked charred with soot. Traces of my blood were spattered here and there, a consequence of the pressure requisite to write.
I can't often play outside, but I can always write.
I wondered where Mama had gone. Last night she and Daddy went dancing. I'm sure if I went out of my room I would find them, collapsed on the couch in a cocoon, drunk with wine and the pleasure of forgetting they had a butterfly for a child. Sometimes I nearly forgot myself, and it was very sweet.
I sighed, though profoundly unruffled. Oddly enough, being a girl who could bleed at the slightest touch, nothing much ever perturbed me.
I closed my eyes. It was almost daybreak. I had stayed awake through two dusks, two dawns, and now two daybreaks. Time cycled like that, it seemed, but I only ever stayed put.
Last night I had gotten my first period, that's why I sat vigil. The dark red in my panties didn't scare me more than the regular laceration acquired by putting on my coveted pair of skinny jeans. When you live a butterfly life like mine, finding signs of life were a daily thing; the only problem was that they often seemed more like signs of death.
I took a breath, let it out, and waited for the new day.