Cocoon

Lost in the woods for what felt like decades, he emerged expecting to be a butterfly.

With all the tales he had been told when he was a child about a wide-eyed adventurer plunging into the forest with only bravery and coming out a new person, he emerged into the open field of dead grass. It seemed his fables had failed him.

He shouted to the heavens, "I have struggled for so many years! Overcome so many trials and tribulations! Fought to keep myself alive..." His voice echoed through the forest. He began to cry tears full of anger interwoven with despair while he waited for the butterfly wings promised to him in his fables. As his tears subsided, he murmured to the forest, "then I have truly failed."

Tired and full of self pity, he lay on the dead grass, ignoring the tiny sprinkles of mist which collected in his beard and mustache. A thick fog began to rush though the forest like a phantasm, engulfing it entirely like a down blanket. It spread across the sky and the temperature dropped incredibly quickly, limiting his vision. As he reached into his pack to get his camping jacket, his small reflective mirror fell out and cracked on a rock. "Why!" he yelled again with a sense of renewed passion. As he leaned over to pick it up, he saw himself, after all of these months on his journey.

Shattered glass projects shattered images; this wasn't the case for him. He only vaguely saw the person who first set out on the journey; he was a young, inexperienced teenager, who decided he wanted to have an adventure. It wasn't his beard or his long matted hair, it was the inner strength he saw. He had developed a type of resolve which that boy could have never understood or believed he had inside. A tear welled up in his eye. While he might have not grown butterfly wings, he had become something more than what was promised to him in his fables. That broken image now reflected a full picture of who he had become.

Lost in the woods for what felt like decades, he emerged expecting to be a butterfly, but instead came out a man.