Abject Permanence

On sex, metamorphosis, and inconvenient desires

Larissa Pham
Gay Mag
Published in
8 min readApr 24, 2018

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YYesterday 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…

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Gay Mag
Gay Mag

Published in Gay Mag

A new magazine from Roxane Gay offering some of the most interesting and thoughtful cultural criticism to be found on the Web. Our first quarterly is coming in June 2019. We value deep explorations, timelessness, and challenging conventional thinking without being cheap and lazy.

Larissa Pham
Larissa Pham

Written by Larissa Pham

Larissa Pham is a writer in Brooklyn.