Butterfly Wings

I’m driving home in the rain after having my needles in my shoulders to open my heart space from the way my vertebrae curled inwards in the midst of my illness, occupying a posture of protection, and it reminds me of a passage I wrote in my manuscript about butterfly wings.

In the original piece, I write about the surgery table, and the last moments before the anesthesia haze. Pinned open like butterfly wings, strapped to a table about to be cut ribcage to hip bone, and it felt like a butterfly pinned with wings wide onto a specimen board to be examined.

Both the butterfly, and the surgery I documented, detailed an inquiry into a pathology, but this time we’re bent towards healing.

I’ve been thinking of all the parts of myself I’ve had to put back together after the dissection. All of the ways in which my skeleton altered itself to hold such pain that we slowly pin back into place. My skin is red where the needles break through, and I think of all the needles I’ve had before. Each one was used to extract blood and marrow to analyze under a microscope, and there’s something oddly poetic about this one meant to realign what was previously shattered.

Authenticity fits me like an awkward skin, and I’ve yet to learn how to place myself inside my own body. I’ve only recently learned how to tell my own stories.

I remember as a girl being told We don’t say that here until I learned not to speak at all. Until my ribcage curled and solidified to protect all the stories we could not tell. The absorbing of stories inside of my own body calcified into decades of symptoms and it isn’t until I’m sitting in a somatic psychology workshop on the nervous system and chronic illness that I realize each new curve of my skeleton and frantic beat of my heart is a rebellion against having been forced to be a shelter for so long.

I apologize before I enter a room, I feel the weight of inconvenience on my shoulders, I settle for less than I know I want because I already take up too much space just existing as a non able bodied person in this world, and I’m constantly looking over my shoulder to see if someone else thinks I’m a fraud.

As I leave the clinic, the sky breaks ever so slightly as sunlight filters between the heavy cloud coverage. My body that pulsated with pressure changes feels a bit lighter now. This is what it feels like to be slowly piecing yourself back together. I’ve spent so long pinned to the specimen board as something to be observed that I forgot butterflies are made for flight.

And for the first time, I think I can feel the fluttering of my wings.