Butterflies

Butterflies is a Michael Jackson song that accompanies Nyia Crosland during a spring shopping trip and briefly turns a routine errand into a scene of movement, pleasure, and memory. Heard through the mall speakers before her shift at Chantel Fifty, it frames Nyia as a woman actively enjoying the life she has built while carrying an unresolved romantic past that remains physically and emotionally vivid.

Appearance in the Mall

Butterflies plays as Nyia walks through the mall before work. She bops her head and performs a small two-step to the beat on her way to her favorite clothing store, making the song part of her bodily rhythm rather than merely background sound. The moment establishes her as cheerful and self-possessed: she is shopping for herself, preparing for the warm spring weather, and treating the outing as a welcome pleasure before returning to the demands of her job.

The song’s presence also sits within a distinctly material setting. Nyia examines shirts against her chest, chooses a soft red floor-length maxi dress, and pairs it with jeweled flip-flops before trying both on in the fitting room. Her enjoyment of the music accompanies this act of looking at and presenting herself, while her later purchase of affordable black 90s-style shoes for Trey shows the same outing moving between personal indulgence and practical motherhood. Butterflies therefore marks a brief interval in which Nyia can be both a woman enjoying fashion and a mother budgeting for her growing son.

Seasonal Pleasure and Motherhood

The mall’s spring decorations extend the song’s buoyant atmosphere. Nyia photographs a live pine tree more than twenty feet tall, dressed with pastel birds, sheer green and purple ribbon, cotton gnomes, glittering curled sticks, Easter eggs, flowers, and a large green-and-purple bow. She takes the pictures because Trey will enjoy seeing what he repeatedly calls the mall’s “Christmas Trees,” even when the decorations are for another season. The comic mismatch between the tree’s spring design and Trey’s description becomes an affectionate sign of their shared world.

Nyia’s pleasure is consequently relational rather than purely private. The music, the dress, the tree, and the photographs all pass through her awareness of Trey, whom she regards as her everything and her reason for surviving the period when, at twenty-two, she believed her life had ended. The song’s lively pulse helps hold together the present she values: her son, her steady work, and the ordinary freedom to enjoy a morning at the mall.

Memory of Daeshim

The mall scene opens into Nyia’s recollection of Daeshim. Trey’s father left without saying goodbye, and Nyia still loved him despite the abandonment. She had not known that she was pregnant at the time; had she known, she would have told Daeshim. The memory gives the song a second register. Its immediate energy belongs to the present, but the emotional current beneath the scene reaches back to the relationship that ended before Daeshim knew he had a child.

Nyia and Daeshim had met at North Carolina Central University, where she studied nursing while working to help her father pay the bills during her mother’s chemotherapy. Daeshim, a forensic science major two years ahead of her, deliberately entered the nursing building because he knew he would see her. After accidentally bumping into her, he called her “Aleumdaun,” later explaining that the word meant beautiful. What initially seemed both intrusive and charming became his nickname for her during their whirlwind romance.

Their relationship filled the space between classes with concerts, movies, poetry slams, and quiet dinners at Daeshim’s apartment. Nyia’s recollection emphasizes that the intimacy has remained unmatched during the eight years since their separation: no other man has produced the same bodily response when he speaks her name. Butterflies therefore accompanies a present-day scene in which Nyia appears content while quietly revealing that Daeshim’s emotional and physical imprint has never disappeared.

From Photograph to Recognition

The song also belongs to a larger pattern in which images and commercial spaces preserve what separation has obscured. At Chantel Fifty, Jamal explains that he submits photographs to a magazine and had previously photographed Nyia and other staff members. A spread featuring the diner was published in Diners and Dives, a periodical devoted to coffee shops, restaurants, and diners around North Carolina. Nyia recognizes herself in one of Jamal’s photographs, dressed in leggings and black spandex, and returns to work after admiring the result.

Later, Daeshim pulls a copy of Diners and Dives from his bag and reads its title while sitting in a leather recliner. He searches the table of contents for Nyia’s name, then finds a feature on Chantel Fifty titled “Best Kept Secrets,” containing photographs of North Carolina diners, food, drinks, and smiling servers. The magazine transforms Nyia’s everyday workplace into a trace by which Daeshim can begin finding her again. In that sequence, Butterflies stands at the beginning of a network of looking, display, and recognition: Nyia moves through the mall listening to music and photographing the tree, Jamal photographs the diner, and Daeshim later uses the published images to recover a connection he lost.

Narrative Significance

Butterflies is not treated as a separate performance or quoted lyric; it is an environmental expression that gives Nyia’s entrance a distinct emotional tempo. Its upbeat sound contrasts with the concealed history of abandonment, pregnancy, and eight years of separation that follows the shopping scene. The contrast is important because Nyia is not introduced as someone merely defined by loss. She has a job she loves at Chantel Fifty, a present father, a precocious son, and enough ease to dance through a mall while choosing a dress.

At the same time, the song’s title resonates with the instability beneath that composure. Nyia’s life appears settled, yet memory can still carry her back to Daeshim with immediate force. Butterflies thus functions as a compact tonal marker for the book’s second-chance romance: present-day domestic happiness and unresolved desire coexist until an image in a magazine begins to make reunion possible.