CATCHING BUTTERFLIES
written by ZELENE WONG
edited by AGATHA WONG
Settling her head carefully beside her mother’s frail, bony arm, Quinn wept silent tears as she listened to her slow, irregular breathing. Gently placing her quivering hand on her mother’s own delicate one, Quinn hummed softly whilst blinking furiously. Ever since Quinn could remember, her mother had always supported her as best as she could in every possible way. She was an adventurous person who had great ambitions and wanted to explore the world. However, after giving birth to Quinn, she clipped her wings and settled down, striving to give the best life she could to her only daughter. Her lifeless eyes once sparkled at Quinn; her fragile collarbone once sat above a lace wedding gown; and those arms covered in tubes once swung Quinn around and around in the air until she squealed to be put down.
artwork by HANNAH WONG
Her feet had known the streets of Rome and the sidewalks of New York. Now, Quinn could only make out the shell of her once lively mother, who would walk to the ends of the earth if only to make Quinn smile.
Growing up, Quinn wasn’t the most generous towards her mother. She would complain and complain about the specks of dust that littered her life and about how her flashy friends would ride in their flashy cars in flashy clothes while she couldn’t.
“If you loved me, you would have bought me that new bag. All of my friends have it, mom,” she remembered retorting; now, all Quinn longed for was the warmth of a mother’s embrace; she longed for that soft smile those cracked lips would contort into. If Quinn could go back in time, she would have apologized and appreciated all that her mother had done for her.
“Mom, I’m sorry for asking you to style my hair a certain way, then furiously ripping it out because it wasn’t what I asked for.”
“Mom, I’m sorry for constantly whining about our simple lifestyle.”
All of these seemingly tiny things that she hadn’t batted an eye over before would fill Quinn with guilt every time she remembered them. Time was such a funny thing, she mused: colorless and shapeless, there yet not there; yet every time the sun rose and fell, everyone was conscious of the passing of time.
If people could go back in time to change anything in the past, would they? The Young Post asked different people whether or not they would alter their lives. Chan Wai-Fong, 75, a housewife, stated that if possible, she would definitely go back in time. “We all make mistakes; while some can be taken as life lessons, I don’t mind changing some others.”
On the other hand, Sarah Rose, 29, a publady, commented that she would not. ‘I very strongly believe that everything happens for a reason, and as a very big Star Trek fan, I like the word “Kaiidth”, which in the Vulcan language, roughly means “What is, is.”
Sarah has also expressed that if she had made any changes to the past, there would be no future as she knows it. ‘My life is not perfect, nor is it what I ever dreamt of as a child, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like it. I don’t want it to change by changing the past. I want it to change by me changing the present.’
Memories shape a person. You are who you are because of everything that has happened before. Every single thing that happened to you happened for a reason. Falling off your bike countless times taught you to not be afraid of failing. Obtaining unsatisfactory results on a test taught you to work harder next time. In return, you’d start evolving and eventually metamorphose into a better you.
The Butterfly Effect is how a single occurrence, no matter how minor, could have a huge impact on the future. As stated in an article by Farnan Street, the Butterfly Effect is an often misunderstood phenomenon wherein small changes in starting conditions could lead to vastly different outcomes.
Ray Bradbury wrote a science fiction short story called ‘A Sound of Thunder’ which perfectly represents the butterfly effect. In the story, a group travels back to the past to hunt dinosaurs. However, one hunter strays off the path and steps on a butterfly. When they return to the present, they are startled to see that the world has changed for the worse.
“It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe,” Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman has stated.
Although the concept of the butterfly effect has long been controversial, its identification is credited to Edward Lorenz. Lorenz was a meteorologist and mathematician. In the 1950s, Lorenz was searching for a means of predicting the weather, as he found linear models to be unsuccessful. During experiments simulating weather forecasts, he entered the initial condition to be 0.506 instead of 0.506127. The results were astonishing as the predictions were vastly different from what he had expected. From this, he concluded that a tiny change in the initial conditions had enormous long-term implications.
Benjamin Franklin, a founding father, provided a poetic perspective of the Butterfly Effect.
“For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For want of a horse the rider was lost,
For want of a rider the battle was lost,
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail,” quoth he.
This meant that the lack of ‘one horseshoe nail’ could be inconsequential, or it could indirectly cause the loss of a war.
To Quinn, the sound of silence was cacophonic. She lifted her head and blinked at the long line displayed on the screen. Gone. Her mother was gone. All the memories and all the butterflies were resigned to the unattainable past. No more laughing with her mother as they flipped through baby photos and no more gazing up at the stars at night side by side. Just then, Quinn wished for nothing more than to stumble back through the nebulous miasma of time and cherish all those little butterflies with her mother’s guidance beside her.