I’m quite fond of my physics classroom. It’s a large room. In a school full of cramped classrooms with ceilings so low that you can jump and touch them, people always notice how spacious this room is. The amount of space is liberating when we solve problems—ideas seem to leap and soar in every direction just like gas particles bouncing around unrestricted.
Coming into the classroom, you’ll notice how all the walls are blackboards. Throughout the week, notes, formulas, and equations cover the walls, but every Monday, the chalky blackboards are washed to reveal their dark surfaces. You’ll also notice the lights on the ceiling. Instead of the flickering white lights that are in every other classroom, this classroom has amber lights that encase the entire classroom in a golden glow—the lights make the air in the classroom look viscous, like honey.
Today, my teacher is giving a lecture about kinetic friction. I try to pay attention, but it’s frighteningly frigid in this classroom today—the heaters behind me are groaning to fight the cold air in vain. I’m shivering despite the warmth of my winter coat, and I’m pretending to follow along as my teacher solves a practice problem.
I reach into my coat pocket. I find what I’m looking for—a blue butterfly encased in a resin disk the diameter of a tennis ball. I flip it back and forth a few times, admiring the butterfly inside. My physics teacher gave all of us one of these resin butterflies at the start of the year—she said she had a friend who put lots of butterflies in resin.
My friends at the table smile at me and pull out their own butterflies, and we start sliding the resin disks around like hockey pucks on the smooth table. We take care not to drop the disks, because if the resin fell to the ground, it would shatter.
At the end of her lecture, my teacher comes around, chides us for not paying attention, but turns our little game of butterfly hockey into a lesson about kinetic friction. She tells us that the table and resin disks are both smooth, and that little kinetic friction opposes their movement, allowing the disks to glide across the table.
Then, she tells us that she has a surprise. As soon as we hear the word “surprise,” my friends and I stop sliding the resin disks around (my teacher likes to surprise us with tests). Seeing a classroom of panicked faces, she simply laughs and leaves the classroom.
She’s gone for a while, and by the third minute of her absence, the classroom is roaring with conversation.
When she comes back, she’s holding something draped in satin. She brings it over to an empty lab bench and pauses, waiting for dramatic effect. After a few seconds, she takes the satin off, revealing a mesh cage, and then opens it.
At first, most of us in the back are squinting to see what’s in the cage. But after one moment, we see dozens of butterflies flooding out of the mesh cage into our classroom.
The butterflies all look a bit different from one another—no two of them look like the same species. There are small butterflies whose wings are the size of a child’s pinky but there are also big butterflies whose wings would span an adult’s face. Some of the butterflies have speckled wings with a rainbow of colors, but others are less colorful. I start noticing the individual colors I see: red (a deep ruby), blue (a light cerulean), orange (I know this one is a Monarch butterfly), white (an ivory butterfly you might see on a meadow of flowers).
The butterflies flutter everywhere, landing briefly before taking flight again. It’s so weird to see butterflies perched on notebooks and backpacks, on thermometers and voltmeters, on pulleys and weights, on heads and hands. For around a minute, my entire classroom is in a true silence, appreciating the absurdity of the butterflies finding home in the familiar black walls of our classroom.
Then, someone breaks the silence. My classmates start talking and getting out of their seats, admiring the butterflies as if they were in a botanical garden, not a physics classroom. As they talk, their breaths are suspended in the cold air, and as the butterflies move through these foggy clouds, it is as if they are a flock of birds flying through a cloudy sky. Despite this spectacle, I stay firmly rooted to my seat—the surreality of the situation has paralyzed me.
A blue butterfly settles on my notebook. On the college-ruled paper, the butterfly’s colored wings (the black border blends into a cerulean center) look particularly vibrant. The butterfly then flutters on top of my resin disk—it stays there a while. I wonder whether it knows that the butterfly in resin cannot move.
A quarter of an hour passes. One by one, the butterflies flit toward the ceiling. My blue butterfly is one of the last to go. The amber lights become tinted by the wings of the butterflies, casting flashes of color in every direction like a disco ball at a party. My classmates start asking each other why the butterflies went to the ceiling. After a few minutes of silly conjecture, a girl searches it up on their phone and explains that butterflies are positively photoreceptive—they like light.
Now, the entire class is looking at the ceiling. The butterflies are huddled near the lights, and they’re moving less and less. On the ground, it feels like some strange party—everybody is huddled in their winter coats as a rainbow of color is scattered all throughout a physics classroom.
Suddenly, the girl with the phone squeals and panics. Our class stops our silent observation of the butterflies to look at her. As she looks up and yells that the butterflies are going to die, the first butterfly drops. It’s white, and as it falls, its wings spread to slow its descent. It settles a few meters away from me, its white wings looking eerily like college-ruled paper on the black lab table.
One by one, the butterflies fall. They flutter down just as leaves flutter down in the autumn.
I lock my eyes on the cerulean wings of the butterfly who perched on my notebook. I find myself hoping it can hold on longer, that it can prevent its inevitable descent. Eventually, my cerulean butterfly, too, falls. As its wings are shrouded by the golden glow that pulsates from the amber lights, the cerulean butterfly is encased in resin. The cerulean butterfly settles motionless on my notebook next to its inanimate friend.