Abject Permanence

On sex, metamorphosis, and inconvenient desires

Yesterday I learned that the butterfly obliterates itself before being born again. There is one thing: the caterpillar. And there is another: the chrysalis. And then there is a third, which is the butterfly—a monarch or something else with symmetrical wings. But who knows what happens in the chrysalis? For a while, there is only a glittering fluid. Then there is something. Then it has a name.

Not unusual for a woman to always want to be smaller, and a host of possibilities as to why. In this story, I am 13. A friend is starving herself. We all watch her at lunch, and no one says anything about it, because it is already written as if in neon lights. She is a gymnast. She eats only apples, grass-green and hard, bitten down to the quick. She talks about her body constantly. She is strong. Someone notices and thinks I am like her, but I know we’re different. Someone forces an intervention. For me, nothing happens, and I am too young to understand my own mania anyway. The answer is not a disorder of the body but of the spirit.

Not the weight of the body but the fact of the body. Not the shape of the body but the needs of…