Butterflies
Butterflies as an image that carries several things at once: fragility (the wings crush easily), brevity (the life is short), beauty (the wings are vivid and singular), transformation (out of the chrysalis), flight (release from an earlier form), and the everyday "butterflies in the stomach" of new love. They tend to appear at the threshold of a relationship - emerging as love begins, destroyed as it ends.
The butterfly is a beauty that was always going to be brief: something that cannot be held, that changes form, that dies in proportion to how alive it briefly was. Its power often comes from holding all of those senses at once without settling on one.
Appears in 2 songs
“When the butterflies turned to dust that covered my whole room”
The butterflies represent multiple layers of the relationship: the excitement of new love (butterflies in the stomach), fragility, temporal beauty, transformation (chrysalis), and flight/freedom. Their turning to dust marks the death of all those qualities.
“Will it patch your broken wings?”
The broken wings image characterizes Betty as damaged, and crucially, from James's perspective she is the broken one, not him. Uncle Jerry reads this as further evidence of James's inability to take responsibility: 'she's broken. Not him. He's good. He's OK.'