Mother believes that a young girl’s upbringing is not complete without witnessing a butterfly’s life cycle. To be raised as a girl in our home is an act of shedding skin, growing a pair, and embracing change. If your wings get stuck, you wiggle about. If the chrysalis is tough, you punch its walls. Survival is a matter of how willing you are.

Huevo

I am but a freckle on a leaf, burdened to evergreen beneath the flaming sun. Freckle in the face of life, power in the face of oblivion. I don’t know why I am or, rather, why I keep trying to be. I know nothing of birth but of rebirth. I’ve been here before. I know how this ends. 

I munch out of my first home and swallow.

Larva

Is it greedy to want to exist unexplained? To let my stripes create roller coasters for ants, bouncing up, down across milkweeds. Munch. Is it greedy to want? To be? To ask?

My thoughts are disrupted by shaking, rumbling, coming from somewhere. I munch mindlessly until I believe myself to grow taller. Has my transition occurred early? Is this burden the pair of wings I am destined to model?

I munch a last bite before I am pushed into a foggy wave of a pink vessel.

Touring this space is necessary. Munch. It appears to be dinner and a show; there’s enlarged true legs from outside moving back and forth. Munch. A steady movement upward and I am met with much dimmer suns—eyes blinking in and out of existence. There are trees of filaments surrounding these unlit suns as they eagerly stare at me. Mun-. 

A jolt backwards pushes me away from the leaves and into the other side of the pink. There are crunches and wobbles as whoever, whatever is carrying me traverses a boundless plane.

They’re watching me through pink as I swing in late summer’s sauna. They smile from east to west. I cling to the frigid metal of my enclosure. I am now, seemingly, in their alabaster chrysalis, fabricated night, shielded from the flaming sun, while the unlit suns on enlarged true legs have lost interest in me.

Alone. In a different, distant, way. In a way where I could never not be alone. Where I am subjected to others outside of the self, the whole. 

Alone. 

Crisálida

I rewind into myself and decide that I am my own hallowed, haunted home. That I will build the foundation. That I am the foundation, with walls and an impermeable roof. I am the fragmented floor plan and every wall’s scrapes, bumps, and bruises. I am every cabinet that does not quite close, every tile missing a corner. I am every cracked picture frame and every picture inside. I am every line measuring heights on the wall corners and every bump on that wall. I am every mismatched pair of socks and all of their loose threads. 

I rewind into bubbling bile and remember that I am all I ever need. That this home is latent. Shapeless, I sit, stand, and lay all at once in a womb of my own devising. I (in)voluntarily envelop myself in caresses through the on and off of the flaming sun I have since gone out of sync with. In the closing and opening of the unlit suns, I am anew.

For a beat, I become ichor, flowing, trickling. 

For a beat, I am the maker and its creation. 

For a beat, I exist unexplainable. 

I am entropy.

Mariposa

If I wasn’t already in the process of jumping out of my skin, the unlit suns staring at me would have jolted me to do so. And I am riven, swilled, shoehorned into frigid pink ground.

Still, I cling to this solid evernight, alabaster, chrysalis of theirs: are all homes contradictions of yes and no, of there and not, of open and close? 

My new form is idolized by the unlit suns in vibrating oohs and aahs. We appear to be breaking out of their chrysalis as they shield their suns from the flaming one. Maybe it’s an important day for all of us.

My wings open and close, warming in the balmy spring afternoon. I made these wings. I crafted these means to an end of boundlessness. I crafted this transport, transitory; translation of what it means to be free; transcendence of meaning; transition of being.

The pink vessel opens with a k-ch. The unlit suns seem to be encouraging me. They say goodbye with some true leg motions.

The flaming sun gets closer in the ebbs and flows of my new body, gliding through the waves of air. I descend once more. Hoarfrost legs grace lachrymose butter leaves. Still, must I find a home in this bedlam, need I seek refuge in cold flames licking up prickly legs and tattered wings? Do I exist perpetually? Am I shedding another’s skin? Need I explain my garb?

As my eyes adjust, I perceive myself desolate in this mass of green. Where did they go? Am I the cause of fervent distress? Am I the chaos, the mayhem, a sword brandished, a gin straight, a cheap gun, a broken clock? I hold memories of needing, of wanting. Must I have the unfortunate existence of a butterfly, deeply wishing to go back into themself and just be, unexplainable? Yet, 

I am rebellion, I am resurgence, I am rebirth, I am perpetuity, I am contradiction.

I need to find a flower.

I must find myself.

Mother believes that all young girls are monarchs to be. Destined for hardship and possessing innate resilience. To be raised as a girl in our home is therefore an act of staying one. If you get stuck, you cannot stay stagnant. If it gets tough, you cannot say it is so. Survival is a matter of how willing you are to deny yourself.

I am no longer home.