Chrysalis

I was trudging down the street this morning with my dog Sam and thinking just how broken and battered and shattered my body is getting during this thing.  My energy is so low that today I'm getting winded just moving from room to room.  I have a tissue expander inserted that feels like someone has shoved a cutting board in front of my chest wall.  My skin is inflated, preparatory to having the implant surgery sometime in the future.  My arm muscles are stretched and sore and tight, and I move them constantly in fear of losing that range of motion forever.

My head is splotchy, like a Rorschach test, with tufts of stubble splattered across my skull in shadowy clumps.  I have to wear something over it at all times, or else the stubble skritches back and forth across the pillow or the back of the sofa, irritating the inflamed hair follicles even more.  I have bruises on my arm from the various blood draws and infusions and injections.

Internally... another litany of weirdnesses.  I am suddenly acutely sensitive to smell.  I smelled tuna salad from across the house last night; a few moments ago a neighbor must have lit a BBQ using lighter fluid.  I can smell mayonaise from across the room.  I can smell my dog's ears when he shakes his head.  My stomach is a diva.  My headache threatens to come back with the explosions of a few weeks ago.  My mouth is sensitive.  My very bone marrow is agitated, forced to create white blood cells that it really doesn't feel much like producing at the moment.

I'm a mess. 

I'm also very OK.

This is not just a plastic smile saying that.  All of this is kind of icky and weird, and it's OK.  All of this sensitivity comes with other super powers as well.  I am sitting on my back patio and listening to our waterfall and feeling the breeze against my skin and thinking, daaaamn, this is nice.  It's the longest day of the year, I've had no hard deadlines or appointments, and I've just spent the day moving in and out of what my body is telling me.  This is how dogs live, maybe.  From point to point, just following their physical impulses.  This is how people live who are not over-committed.  This is how I'd like to live -- minus the Rorschach head and all the rest of the indignities of course.  With a sense of ... what is it? ... leisure?  Ability to flow?  Time to think and pause and absorb?

It's like I'm in the middle of a process, that's moving very very slowly, and I can't quite see what it's going to evolve into yet.  There are powerful forces at work here, forces of age and destiny and science and resolve.  There is a battlefield going on inside my body, at a literal cellular level, between the chemicals that my doctors are infusing me with and the renegade factions that may be attempting to hide out in the caves, waiting until vigilance has been relieved before skulking out by dead of night in two, four, ten years to try it all again.  I am the dark recesses of the jungle, the blacked out windows of Pakistan, the corridors of my body traversed by warring factions, taking out bits of infrastructure as they go.

It's like this:  Say you live in a house.  And the house is suddenly populated by invisible sneaky nasty little assassins, who only want to kill you.  And you obviously can't live like this, so you go to an assassin expert and he says, sure, I can take care of those assassins for you, but we'll have to call in my friend Steve.  And Steve is a highly talented assassin killer, but... he's lacking in some of the nicer social refinements.  So, if you you want Steve, you may have to deal with some of his vulgarity, and maybe he may have to bring his friends over from time to time, but he'll get the job done (or at least we hope he will.) 

So you have Steve come over, and he comes over with a tank, and a bunch of flame throwers, and a coupla dozen bruisers, and maybe a Mack truck, and a backhoe just for kicks.  And he proceeds to rip the roof off and destroy the plumbing and demolish the walls and upend all the furniture and break all your sentimental little ornaments.  And his friends have filthy mouths and insult your mother and kick your dog and create even more of a spectacular mess, and they live in your house for four months and completely fail to clean up after themselves the entire time.  And one day they move out (hopefully after getting all the little fuckers out of what's left of the woodwork) and then you can start the long long process of putting everything back together again.

It's kind of like that.

I'm living in this chaos, this warfare, with all these different battles going on simultaneously, and I just keep thinking, well, this is a really good excuse for some house cleaning.  And some remodeling.  And some serious reflection.  And... big picture, not necessarily on a moment to moment basis... I'm OK with this.

Which makes me think of a chrysalis.

I have never been a caterpillar, so I don't know what it's like.  But it seems to me that, as some point in a caterpillar's life, something huge and strange and unknowable starts to happen.  Strange urges come out of nowhere, daily life is radically dislodged.  For no apparent reason, suddenly it's all about making a cocoon (which of course there would be no word or concept for, having never had to make one before.)  But the notion is there, and the caterpillar can't stop it. It's an unprecedented life event that just kind of happens and suddenly it's all about that. 

The cocoon is made.  And the next thing the caterpillar knows is that now he's inside it, suffocating, trapped.  Again, no idea of why, or what the end result is supposed to be, or if it will ever be over.  To the caterpillar, it must be terrifying and stupid and completely opaque.  A course of events that has no guarantee whatsoever that anything will be any better afterwards than it was before.

We can assume the caterpillar was planning on going on with his caterpillar ways indefinitely. We can assume the caterpillar looked at the moths fluttering by and felt no sense of kinship or envy. We can assume that there was no ambition in the caterpillar's little caterpillar brain that said, hey, maybe we can fly.

And then this thing happens. 

Well, we all know how that story ends.  Being a moth is better than being a worm.  Just as being on the other side of this thing is going to be better than being in the middle of it. 

I'm in the middle, irrevocably evolving, struggling.  I have no idea what will be on the other side.  And, unlike watching the caterpillar and knowing that its story will have a good ending, I cannot say with 100% certainty that mine will.  I have good statistics on my side, but the assassin killers could be having an off day, and we just never know.

However, the ability to build a new roof, the opportunity to re-plumb the depths after Steve and his minions are done pulling out all the foundations out and strewing them around the neighborhood is very interesting to me.  I emptied out half my closet the other day; I need new clothes but I don't know what they will be... all I know is that I need to make room for something different.  I look at my face and hands and think "when I'm done with this I'm going to look very much different, like I've been through something, like I'm no longer unscathed."  I have some battle scars; I will have seen much more of the world through these eyes.  I will also have bought some time within the chrysalis... time to think and reform and shed some old skin.  I will have mutated from the inside out and will come out the other side completely changed. 

I don't know what I will look like; I don't know who I will be; I don't even know how long I will live.  I don't know anything except right now I'm trapped in the middle of this event and that someday I will break free of it again.