Blood and Wings and Blood

I should have had my period by now but my cycles are all fucked up since I hit my forties. You know it will happen eventually, you just don’t ever think it will happen to you. Like, now.  There was always something about the eventual onset of menopause that was in the future, and a distant future at that.

You don’t want to talk about this? Too bloody? Too gross but not in the fun way like those shit slasher movies you watch with all the gore and gratuitous violence?

It’s funny to me. The way that people are. Funny-tragic, I mean. The way they have convinced you that women are disposable and you believed it and moved on and you don’t think that’s a kind of cruelty. You think that’s just the way it is. I can’t blame you. I thought so, too. Parts of me still do and it seems I keep discovering new ones as the years go by. It’s layered into us. It’s almost eerily clever in its own grotesque way.

Did you know that if you cut open a cocoon at any point during its existence you will most likely just see a gooey mess? You will not ever see a half-caterpillar-half-butterfly because apparently it doesn’t happen like that. The butterfly sort of happens all at once suddenly out of the sticky glob of nothing recognizable as anything.

And if I remember correctly, the tiny creature thing just kind of finally drops out one day, also suddenly, from the chrysalis, wings completely gummed together by the soggy muck is was soaked within for however many days. Eight to twelve days.

It is a rather raw and violent way to exit one form of life and enter a new one. Later on we watch in delight as the butterfly flutters through a garden and think, How sweet, delicate, beautiful. Some butterflies make it and some don’t. Some can’t get their wings to open and so they fall to their sad little deaths. Some can only manage one wing, which is not enough.

I’m not trying to make this some kind of metaphor for struggle or some lesson about how precious and slim your life is, or mine for that matter. I’m not trying to say anything other than birth, death, life, are all parts of a unified cycle, and each stage contains within it its own kind of ugliness, stickiness, and violence. And that our collective denial of the brutality of these cycles, our denial of the excruciating pain of the destruction that is giving birth, or the crushing pain a woman must endure month after month within her own naturally pain-wracked body, is to deny, too, the magnificent awe the strength of a woman should inspire.

All of this has been said before. This is not a new ask, to be acknowledged, to be respected, to be seen for all that a woman actually is instead of for what she has been told to be: pretty, happy, quiet, obedient, clean. Perhaps each woman has to say these things for herself at some point in her life, though. In order to make it real in her own way. Part of it is to finally acknowledge, respect, and see herself. We spend our whole lives holding back or denying a kind of pain which is hard to explain because it is so intimate, so deeply woven in that we are some how too close to see it.

Some butterflies, of course, do make it. They drop and they fly and in one ecstatic movement they are off on their own adventures. And they come to know the sunshine and the soft peach light of summer sunset falling upon the colorful petals. And the cold hard rain and the thrashing storms and the driving winds, too.

.

Photo by Cassidy Dickens