Chrysalis

  

              I'm not allowed to be touched, but I'd sure as hell like to be. 

Photo credit goes to Nathan Dumlao

When I was little and watched the neighborhood kids play in the dirt from the sterile, plate-glass window on the front of our big, new house, Mama told me I couldn’t play.  I don’t remember how old I was.  Two? Three? Not quite old enough to show you a number with my soft fingers when you asked—not that I could use my hands for much else, now or back then.  Those days, I had skin as white and thin and sheer as butterfly wings.  Mama told me it was beautiful, like gossamer.  I didn’t know what gossamer was, but I was mad at the word that apparently meant that I wasn’t allowed to play outside.

Nowadays I’m significantly bigger and stronger, but I’m still my mother’s butterfly, soft and fragile.  Not to be touched.  By anyone, and just barely by my mama and my daddy.  Mama wraps my new wounds in gauze each night—“Its your chrysalis”, she always says—before she kisses me with her lashes.  You’re my butterfly, she coos.  Still.  To a fifteen-year-old girl.  A girl old enough to imagine the feel of a boy’s stubble against her face when her daddy presses her cheek with the slightest of touches to his five o’clock shadow before he turns her loose to flutter through the imposing doors of her high school.

It wasn’t fair, I always think.  Ladies are made to be delicate, but God took his perfect design for this body a step too far.

So yes, fifteen years old, I was still a baby in almost every sense of the word.  I couldn’t run.  It was hard to walk without cracking open a new blister through my specially-made shoes and one thousand layers of bandaging.  It was hard to feed myself with my silky fingers and lips.  Talking was like trying to hold onto two big fat gooey pieces of bubblegum before they wobbled to the floor and sing at the same time.  It hurt to smile.  The only difference, as far as I can tell, between little old can’t-play-in-the-dirt-me and the gooey, bloody mouth of my teenagehood is, under my transparent adolescent skin shines red-hot blood.

I remember awakening one morning and brushing a button on the remote to turn on the TV, and gasping as a shade similar to the one that had just dissipated behind my eyelids, yet accelerated in depth and speed and volume, came crashing into my view.

              I couldn’t touch, but I loved to look as long as I can remember.  I love color. 

              Especially the color red.

As the TV set came to life, eyes flickered, hands rushed to latch a lock, to loosen clothing, to secure a studio more private.  I felt my cheeks swell in response.  The painting was about to begin.

I waited patiently as the colors I only dared to dream of came gushing slow, then faster.  Skin flashed, creamy white, and then it deepened into blushing pink, and then the heat bloomed into a violent red…

My mother’s voice scuffled in from the hallway.  I quickly punched a button, flinching at the fresh cut on my thumb as it glanced off the rubber button through a hole in my bandage-gloves.  The channel changed.  A different red, maybe a crimson, pulsed in jerking waves from a man’s brow just a moment before he threw a fist; an ugly color, jarring like lightning, struck me as it struck a woman’s stone face.  Writhing yellow and waning gray, like the color of clouds when they would rather have been painted into a different sky, crept from the receiving woman’s frozen features, like the final flag, flailing in the wind, to be cast up from a sinking ship.  This was how you painted surrender.

              My door clanged open.

“Violet! It’s time to go.” My mother turned, saw the screen.  The lines on her forehead when she frowned made her look as gray as the stone-faced woman.

      “Honey, are you really watching all this drama again?”

            I felt my cheeks swell up again.  There was no hiding it.  New rivulets of red, red for a different reason, trickled out from underneath my butterfly face.  In the far right corner of my room, where my mother couldn’t see, a cheek-pink bra lie in the bottom of the waste basket like a corpse, a mangled mess of brown and red.  Seeing the more recent damages, she drew a long sigh and reached for the gauze amongst the ranks of assorted bandages and ointments stationed on my dresser, always at the ready.  Even if I had managed to fumble the television’s power off in time, she would have still seen the colors in the room.

And both because she had seen the colors in the room and in spite of her seeing, she was silent as she went to work binding my finger bandages tighter.  Keeping a straight face despite the pain, under the chrysalis of my foot wrappings and my white covers, I scraped the sharp edge of my littlest toenail against its neighbor, where she wouldn’t see to fix it. 

It didn’t matter what my body looked like.  I was never going to come out.