Before the Butterfly

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Sunday, May 16th, 2021 - 4:18pm.

My friend Marina is in town. I haven’t seen her in about a year and a half but because the last time we saw each other was “pre-pandemic,” it feels like it’s been a really long time. The city is still pretty much closed down so instead of sitting at the terrace of a café, we are sitting on the steps near the canal with two cans of beer we bought in a bakery. The sun is shining and we are grateful to have found a spot to just sit, talk and be together. Not so easy to come by these days.

She’s filling me in on the different things that are going on in her life and there are admittedly a lot of moving parts. Change is a comin’ but everything is up in the air and, at this point, things could go in so many different directions.

“Whew, that’s a lot,” I say.

“Yeah, I just hope I’m in that liquid stage inside the chrysalis,” she replies.

Me: “Yeah, totally. Wait...what?”

She looks at me, “You know how it works, right? When the caterpillar goes into the chrysalis?” She goes on to explain that inside the chrysalis the caterpillar actually melts into a completely liquid state and then transforms into a butterfly. She adds, “It’s not like there’s just a caterpillar in there that sprouts some wings and pops out as a butterfly.” I laugh when she says it because the image is funny but also because I realize that that’s pretty much exactly what I’d thought.

After heading home, I wanted to read more about this and typed: “chrysalis melt” into the search engine. What popped up was: chrysalis meltdown.

Ahhh. The caterpillar doesn’t just melt, it has a total meltdown.

I discovered that while the words cocoon and chrysalis are often used interchangeably, they’re not at all the same. Moth larvae spin cocoons of silk, butterfly larvae do not. Instead, they form a chrysalis, which is a hard exoskeleton. Essentially, caterpillars seal themselves inside their own skin and then digest themselves, releasing enzymes that dissolve all of their tissues. If you cut the chrysalis open at the right stage, all you would find inside would be a green liquid. No caterpillar, no butterfly.

I’m aware that I’m totally anthropomorphizing here, but talk about a leap of faith.

The caterpillar and the butterfly are the quintessential symbols of transformation and metamorphosis, but I never knew that for a butterfly to be born, a caterpillar had to entirely relinquish itself, totally dissolve. I’d never grasped that the breakdown was so complete and that there was an in-between stage after the caterpillar but before the butterfly.

I found all this fascinating and promptly fell down a rabbit hole of articles on the topic. To my amazement, I read that studies show that despite the complete meltdown phase, butterflies may remember what they learned in the late stages of their caterpillar lives. I can only wish humans to be so lucky. I hope that if we give ourselves over to total transformation, the thing we get to keep is what we’ve learned. I love the notion that even when everything falls completely apart, there is an essential ‘knowing self’ that may remain.

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