Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Only a day or two after being separated from my sister, I had been sent to wash some rags one afternoon, when a moth came fluttering down from the sky onto my arm. I flicked it off, expecting that it would fly away, but instead it sailed like a pebble across the courtyard and lay there upon the ground. I didn't know if it had fallen from the sky already dead or if I had killed it, but its little insect death touched me. I admired the lovelypattern on its wings, and hten wrapped it in one of the rags I was washing and hit it away beneath the foundation of the house.
I hadn't thought about this moth since then; but the moment it came to mind I got on my knees and looked under the house until i found it. So many things in my life had changed, even the way I looked; but when I unwrapped the moth from its funeral shroud, it was the same startingly lovely creature as on the day I had entombed it. It seemed to be wearing a robe in subdued grays and browns, like Mother wore when she went to her mah-jongg games at night. Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect, and so utterly unchanged. If only one thing in my life had been the same as during that first week in Kyoto...As I thought of this my mind began to swirl like a hurricane. It struck me that we-the moth and I-were two opposite extremes. My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every way; but hte moth was likea piece of stone, changing not at all. While thinking this thought, I reached out a finger to feel the moth's velvety surface: but when I brushed it with my fingertip, it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound, without even a moment in which I could see it crumbling. I was so astonished I let out a cry. The swirling in my mind stopped; I felt as if I had stepped into the eye of a storm. I let the tiny shroud and its pile of ashes flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning. The stale air had washed away. The past was gone. My mother and father were dead and I could do nothing to change it. But I suppose that for the past year I'd been dead in a way too. And my sister...yes, she was gone; but I wasn't gone. I'm not sure this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past, but foward towards the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would that future be?