The Last Dance of the Social Butterfly

I used to call her my Social Butterfly.

She never liked the nickname.

“Butterflies are fragile,” she’d say, laughing. “I’m tougher than I look.”

And she was.

But still—there was something about the way she moved through the world. How she flitted into rooms and made them warmer. How her smile disarmed cynics and her voice made you forget what you were worried about. She carried joy like a scent, something faint and floral that lingered after she left.

She made people feel.

I first saw her at a poetry open mic in Montrose. She wore a navy coat with mismatched buttons and boots that had clearly danced through every season. I was in the corner—quiet, sipping cheap coffee, editing a poem I’d never read out loud.

She stood up without paper, without nerves. And spoke.

Her voice wasn’t loud, but it cut through. Like wind chimes on a still day. The room leaned toward her.

I leaned too.

After the reading, she sat next to me like it was the most natural thing in the world. “You’re a watcher,” she said. “I like that. It means you see things most people don’t.”

That night, she asked if I wanted to get noodles at the late-night truck down the block.

I didn’t usually say yes to anything spontaneous.

But I said yes to her.

We never really stopped saying yes after that.

We became a pair—chaotic and quiet, art and structure.

She painted murals on our apartment walls; I wrote poems on the back of grocery receipts.

Sunday mornings were French press coffee and jazz.

Wednesday nights were wine and crossword puzzles.

She left notes in my jacket pockets—quotes from Rumi or song lyrics she thought I’d love.

When we danced in the living room, barefoot and laughing, I used to think, This is what people write books about.

But slowly, something shifted.

It started small. A dinner party she canceled. A day she stayed in bed. A silence that lasted a little too long.

I didn’t understand it then. I thought she was tired. I thought love could fix anything.

But her smiles got thinner.

Her paintings darker.

One morning, I caught her sitting on the kitchen floor, staring at nothing.

She looked up at me and said, “I don’t know where I went.”

I held her that day. For hours. But the truth was already there: she was slipping.

Butterflies don’t land because they want to.

Sometimes, they’re just out of air.

One gray afternoon, I came home to an empty apartment.

No note. No message.

Just her favorite scarf draped over the chair and the faint scent of jasmine on her pillow.

The mural she had painted on our living room wall—an explosion of color, butterflies in every shape—was unfinished. One wing still blank.

I stared at that wall for hours, waiting for the door to open.

It never did.

Time moved forward in ways I didn’t want it to.

The apartment got quiet.

I stopped drinking coffee on Sundays.

I deleted the playlist we made together.

But I couldn’t bring myself to paint over the wall.

I told friends she had “needed space.”

I told myself she was still out there, fluttering through someone else’s story.

Then, two years later, I saw her.

It was in a bookstore, in a city neither of us lived in. She walked in holding a small child’s hand. Her hair was shorter. Her laugh was quieter.

But it was her.

She glanced my way.

For a moment, her eyes paused on mine.

Recognition sparked—and faded.

She smiled politely, then looked away.

The child tugged at her hand, and they disappeared into the aisles.

I didn’t follow.

Not because I didn’t want to—but because I finally understood.

She hadn’t vanished.

She’d landed.

Maybe in a quieter life.

Maybe in one where she didn’t have to dance just to feel whole.

Some people come into our lives like seasons.

They don’t stay. They don’t have to.

Their beauty is in the way they change everything, even after they’re gone.

She was the breeze in spring.

The laughter in the wind.

The last dance of a butterfly who taught me that even the softest souls carry storms inside them.

And sometimes, letting go is the most loving thing we ever do.