There's a reason why many of the worlds greatest thinkers were loners ... recluses. Because they could never make up their minds. They didn't want to have to make the decisions and face the choices that people who live in society had to. And so they withdrew to somewhere where those choices and decisions were not needed.

***

There was once a girl who came to know of a loner living far away and wanted to get to know him better. He on his part had no such interest. But little conversations soon turned into larger ones and she reminded him of what life was once like before he went into his shell. How nice it felt to be loved, wanted, cherished. And he found himself opening up more and more to her, forgetting the hurt of the past. And then one day he told her he loved her. Though he wasn't quite sure what it was about her that he loved.

He happened to be walking through the woods near his house one afternoon when he spotted a little yellow butterfly nestling its delicate body on the petals of a flower. He remembered how when he was a boy he and his brother would quietly sneak up behind them, grab them by the wings and stuff them into empty matchboxes with tiny little air-holes on the top so that they could breathe. But they always died. It didn't seem cruel at the time, but it did now. So very cruel. A thought ran through his mind -- Why did they put those butterflies into those matchboxes and make air-holes in them when they knew fully well that every butterfly they had done that to earlier had died?

It was the hope that one of them would live ... for how long was not important. It was then that he realised what he was doing to the girl. He loved her but he did not want her to be a butterfly in a matchbox. She should be free - free to fly, and free to come back to him whenever she wanted. And he wanted the same for himself.

And so he told her there was someone else. A butterfly. But she did not understand.