The Spirit of a Chrysalis
(For Joel, the poet low-rate, from -Mac-)
I sit here hour
after hour, day after day. Slow, even breaths take in the stale, musty
air. Every so often I think about moving,
but the only path I envision is a dark, spiral staircase down the neck of a
bottle or some other trap to who knows where.
My chair is uncomfortable, but it’s not as bad as moving. I wonder how long I have been here?
Suddenly, and
unexpectedly, I catch a slight movement in the corner of my eye. The window must have been left open. The faintest touch of a breeze moves the
curtain, and a stream of light floods the corner of the room – and is quickly
gone. For a fraction of a second, I see
differently – but it doesn’t last.
I have no idea
how long I waited, but there it is again. The breeze reappears, and barely
shifts the curtain. The ray of light burns its way across the wooden floor, and
disappears again. Somehow, I muster the
will to move. Eternity passes (who is
counting?) but I make my way out of the chair, across the room to the window.
(Should I celebrate this?) Bravely, I
think, I pull the curtain open a few inches. Now the light is blinding. Shielding my eyes, I look down. A tiny butterfly is sitting on the sill.
The butterfly is
mostly yellow, and one of its wings is deformed, but it clearly is alive, if
not beautiful. What is beauty
anyway? On a whim, I tell my hand to
reach for it. With slow, undetectable
motion, my finger approaches the malformed creature. I’m almost there, but it
is not. It sprang into the air and flew
circuitously to a solitary post at the edge of the woods.
Then it is gone
again, flew away and I stare at the post.
It’s crooked and weathered, and used to belong to a fence. One of the forgotten, rotten rails angles
down to the ground on a rusty nail. The
post stands there abandoned, but firm, crooked, but sturdy. Something is hanging from a knot on the
post.
It looks like a
knot of silk. It’s just hanging
there. There is another just below it,
and some bugs – no, caterpillars – crawling all over the post. They’ve been chewing up the milkweed, at
least that’s what I call it.
Caterpillars sure are ugly, but I watch them anyway.
Now my mind is
spinning: wind and light and creatures,
from the room, to the butterfly, and the post.
Why am I here? Here. Something, someone, somehow beckons me. Me.
The germ of
realization forms in my head, and then floods down to my heart. All of a sudden, I stretch my arms above my
head and yawn. With bold steps I walk
to the door. With no hesitation my
hand, again, reaches out. I turn the
knob and open the door. The silent
almost imperceptible breeze skims across my face. Another chrysalis bursts open.
oo
-MAC-
AF4PS
Fp-51