The night pressed itself against the window like a silent witness. I sat beside it with my knees drawn close, my spine leaning into the cold wall. Moonlight spilled across the floor in broken strips, pale as if unsure whether it belonged here. My fingers traced the wooden frame absently, like touching something that could anchor me to a reality I had been slipping away from for months.
Since the last few months I've been trying to find the way of life, I found myself thinking again. That same sentence had echoed in my mind too many nights to count. I lost my track of what I was. The truth sat inside me, heavy, unmoving. I was attached to things, but they're gone. So I cried for them in my heart, silently.
He sits in the dim light, a fragile silhouette, the unseen narrator might say. A young soul who had been living inside a shell of grief so tight he could barely breathe. A cocoon he did not choose, one built from loss, confusion, and the slow collapse of his former self.
But tonight something different stirred.
The street outside was strangely alive. Shadows stretched as if breathing. The lone streetlamp flickered, then steadied, then trembled again. The world seemed to be leaning toward me, listening, waiting.
Life, I had learned, wasn't something to chase or decode—it was a show, a shifting stage lit by uncertainty and sorrow and brief, piercing moments of clarity. And freedom… freedom wasn't a prize. It wasn't something to grab. It was something to live from moment to moment, breath by breath.
That was why, for the first time in months, I whispered to myself: I want to live my life. A life I want to live.
The words didn't echo. They simply sank into the darkness, accepted, absorbed.
I leaned forward and pressed my forehead to the cold glass. My reflection wavered there—pale, tired, hollow-eyed. But behind those eyes, something had begun to move, something I hadn't seen in a long while.
A crack.
A fissure in the cocoon.
He doesn't notice it yet, the narrator murmured from some distant place. But the shell he's been trapped inside is beginning to split. Pain has softened the hardened layers around him, and now the night is pulling at the seams.
The thought made my heartbeat stumble. For a long time, I had been living as if wrapped in layers that were too tight. Mourning the things I lost. Mourning the person I used to be. I was suffocating in memories, in expectations, in the version of me that no longer fit.
I closed my eyes, breathing in the cold night air that seeped through the cracked window. It tasted sharp, metallic, alive.
Inside me, something trembled.
Not fear.
Not grief.
Something in-between—raw, unfamiliar.
A stir of wings.
I opened my eyes again and watched the moon's pale glow creep over my hands. It made my skin look translucent, like I was fading into something else entirely. Or emerging.
The room behind me was swallowed in shadows. The unmade bed, the books on the desk, the scattered papers—they all looked like remnants of an old life, artifacts of someone I no longer knew. The darkness in the corners no longer felt threatening. It felt like a reminder: this is where transformation begins, not in the light, but in the quiet unknown.
A soft crack echoed inside me—not audible, but felt, like the sound of something splitting open.
My throat tightened.
Am I breaking apart, I wondered, or am I breaking free?
He begins to shift, the watching voice whispered. The cocoon no longer fits. The night senses the change. The moon witnesses the first fracture.
The air felt heavier, almost electric. I pulled my hand back from the window and stared at it. It didn't look different—but it felt different. Tingling. Alive in ways I couldn't explain.
It was absurd—impossible—yet I knew it with a certainty that ran deeper than logic.
I was changing.
I took a breath that scraped against old wounds. Memories crashed through me—faces I loved, moments that broke me, choices that unraveled everything I thought I was. All of them had woven the cocoon around me. All of them had held me tight in darkness. But now, instead of clinging, they were loosening.
Letting go.
A single tear slid down my cheek, warm in contrast to the cold window. It wasn't grief this time. It was release. It was the quiet acceptance that life moves on, even when I begged it to stop.
The moonlight grew stronger, stretching across my legs, my chest, my face, as if illuminating the cracks forming within me.
I exhaled. A long, slow breath that felt like shedding skin.
"I'm done hiding," I whispered.
The words quivered in the air, fragile yet resolute.
And something inside him breaks—not with violence, but with light.
The cocoon fractures.
In my mind, in my heart, in the place where I had buried everything, the shell split open. I could almost feel the pieces falling away, drifting to the floor like dry petals.
My chest expanded in a way it hadn't in months. My breath felt different—deeper, fuller, real.
Outside, the branches of the lonely tree swayed as if bowing. The night wind slipped through the window and wrapped itself around me, cool and soft, like the world welcoming a new version of me into its dark embrace.
I am not what I was, I realized. I am becoming.
And maybe that was the point. Butterflies do not mourn their form. They do not cling to the shell they outgrow. They break it. They leave it behind.
I wiped my face slowly, letting the last traces of the past fall away with that motion.
I stood up from the window, legs trembling—not from weakness, but from the weightlessness of release. The room looked different now, as if the shadows themselves had shifted to make space for the person I was becoming.
He rises, the narrator whispered with quiet reverence.
He steps out of the shell that held him. The darkness does not swallow him—it reveals him.
"I will live," I said softly, almost to the night itself.
"My life. The one I choose."
The wind carried my words away, scattering them into the vast dark like seeds.
And as I stood there—bare, changed, emerging—I felt it fully:
I had finally broken the cocoon.
And the night welcomed the wings I had yet to unfold.