In a scorched and barren place, I saw her first. A dancer of the legless kind, with eyes too small to notice me, butterfly on the breeze of volcanic ash.

Wings dipped in softest lavender and bordered by the truest black, her crooked flight told me she was searching too. So of course, I followed her in secret to the start of a blackened path. Shrouded in that thick smoke of yesterday’s eruption, I am but a shadow of her dizzy escape.

The path this eager dancer followed seemed to lay itself before me, and I felt no concern for gravity, no thought to the steps taken. She’d lead, I’d hang close. She’d dip, I’d turn. She’d burst forward, I’d try to keep up. I had been looking up for so long, I hadn’t noticed the greenery now winding all around me.

There is where she stopped, above a bed of daisies. The trees so tall, I could see no Sun. But how bright it was, I know there was a presence there beside us. I know that butterfly was not just a butterfly.  Was she an angel? A ghost of someone I never knew? There she hovered, above the flowers. I swear she was looking at me. I reached out my hand.

To touch the delicate wings that brought me out from that scorched place and into this paradise. This little paradise just for us. But she was gone. From right before me, she was gone. And here I was, in a place I could have never found alone. And this is where I’ll stay.

And in the midst of that bed of daisies, peace was found. And now a boulder marks the spot where I first met an angel.