-that there is a little door in my room, only big enough to crawl through on my belly, with paint so faded and peeled it is no colour, it is all colours.

This door only unlocks when I am asleep.

When I am, when it does, it opens, and I crawl through, into secret spaces and stairways, to a little room at the top of the building. I climb up through the trapdoor in the floor, the wooden boards worn smooth.

This room is the size of my life, and filled with jars. Each jar contains a cocoon, that is, those that are dated from today onwards.

I take the jar labelled 28th January 2008, and sit by the tiny window. The hinges creak when I push it open. From here, the city is unheard, the city is unseen, the city doesn’t exist. There are no stars.

I chip the wax seal from the jar, and unscrew the tin lid, and tip the cocoon into my palm. They all feel and look the same. They smell like expectation.

To this cocoon, I whisper the events of the day past; all the little things, the big things, the silly/sad/silent/secret things, and the cocoon swells, dries, and peels back to release a moth. Butterfly days are rare. Today, like yesterday, and the day before, is a moth, with the patterns of mundane stillness, fierce turbulence, and quiet camouflage. Most days look like this.

It sits in my palm, waiting for its wings to dry, little feet tripping the fine whorls of my skin. It kisses the crease of my knuckle goodbye, and flies away out the window, never to be seen again.

I close the window, put the jar next to all the other empty jars dating back to my birth, climb down out through the trapdoor, back through the secret spaces and stairways, through the little door with no and all colours, and crawl back into my bed, where I sleep.

Maybe tomorrow will be a butterfly day.

When I wake, I feel tired, I feel unrested, and I remember nothing.