What if our souls were like butterflies? Yours and mine. Two butterflies. You and me. Soul mates.

And just like butterflies, we were a little bit different from each other? Each with different colors. Different symmetrically patterned wings. Uniquely shaped and sized.

What if our two individual spirits were no longer bound in caterpillar form? No more pain of metamorphosis. No more fighting impossible survival odds. No more struggling to transform from mere larvae into winged creatures.

No more crawling on our bellies, chewing tough, ridiculously high-fiber leaves, only to excrete frass from our backends.

No more hiding on the undersides of plants, helpless as slugs, which is a pretty crappy defense against predators.

No longer living incarcerated within this chrysalis we call “being human.”

What if our souls were up there? Flying. Way up in the sky. Soaring. Our wings, catching the first flickers of sunlight at daybreak. Effortlessly fluttering.

Two butterflies. Sailing high over the Great Wall of China. Winging through the rainforests of northwestern Brazil and Colombia. Whizzing along the Grand Canyon. Together. You and me.

What if, as butterflies, the limits of physics no longer applied to us?

For one thing, gravity isn’t an issue anymore for butterflies. We leap off buildings and we’re fine. Even if we choose not to flap our wings, we still survive the fall. Because we can’t “fall” anymore. We’re not heavy enough.

Likewise, as butterflies we no longer have to search for food and water, eking out an existence. The world is now our buffet.

No more coarse green leaves for supper. No more muddy drinking water. We flit through the air, landing on beautiful flowers, sipping nectar as easily as wine comes in at the mouth, and love comes in at the eye.

Oh, it’s great being a butterfly. Indescribably great. In fact, there is no way to even communicate HOW GREAT all this butterflying is to our caterpillar brethren. Caterpillars don’t even have ears.

But…

What if, at some point, all this butterflying becomes—well—old news? It’s not that we don’t love it. We do. But where’s the variety? Being a butterfly is definitely awesome, but let’s be honest, it’s predictable.

Same routine every day. Wake up. Fly around. Eat flower-candy. Repeat. There are no close shaves. Predators can’t catch us. No weeping. No troubles.

Certainly, life is sweet. But how can we TRULY taste sweetness if we’ve never tasted salty, or bitter? How can anyone know anything without first knowing its opposite?

Without black, what is white? Without suffering, what is gladness? Without hell, what is heaven?

So what if, after a while, our two butterfly heroes decide to take a break from butterflying?

What if they decided to play a game? Sort of like hide and seek. What if they agreed to become caterpillars once again? Thereby, going through the trouble of being larvae; enduring the unspeakable hurt of living on the ground, once more.

Thus, experiencing birth. Death. Growing pains. Fear. Loss of loved ones. The sting of rejection. The agony of being earthbound. Choosing to undergo all this suffering; all this madness; all this confusion and sorrow; all this unpredictability, for the reward at the end.

This reward, you could say, is the point of their whole existence. The entire objective of their lives. Which is:

To find each other.

Well.

That’s us. Two butterflies. You and me. Soul mates.

Happy birthday, Jamie. My beautiful and magnificent butterfly.