HEAL YOU | JENLISA

FORTY-THREE

JENNIE

* * *

WITH LISA’S URGING, I START SEEING JENNIFER AGAIN. SHE refers me to a psychiatrist. I go on medication that saves my life.

I start to feel … optimistic. There are days when I even feel good. Drugs don’t clear my creative block, though. When I pick up my violin, I still play in circles, so I set it down. I understand now that I’m not healed enough to play. I have to give my mind time.

I have trouble focusing enough to read anything of significant length, so I find my way to poetry. A poem can be as short as two lines, sometimes even one, but there’s an entire idea contained there, an entire story. That’s perfect for someone like me. I quickly fall in love with rupi kaur’s work, reading a page here, a page there, as I move about my day, sometimes as I fall in and out of sleep while watching documentaries, specifically the “Cape” episode of David Attenborough’s Africa documentary. I watch it for the two-minute scene where butterflies mate above the treeless peak of Mount Mabu in Mozambique. I’m fascinated by the vivid colors and patterns of their iridescent wings and the dizzying number of butterflies fluttering in the blue sky. It looks like a world apart from the one where I live, one that I can only dream of going to.

When Lisa discovers my new special interest, she surprises me by creating a butterfly garden on my tiny balcony. She puts pots of milkweed out and trains passion vine to twine around the railing. As spring turns to summer, my plants blossom with vibrant color, and the butterflies come. It’s just like in Mozambique.

I sit on my balcony for hours, basking in soft rays of sunlight and watching as butterflies dance about me. They’re not shy or afraid of me. Hummingbirds try to compete with them for nectar, and I laugh when my small butterflies battle against their larger opponents and win. Caterpillars hatch from tiny eggs and eat voraciously, chewing through each milkweed leaf in neat rows like when people eat corn on the cob typewriter-style. I name them all. Chompy, Biggolo, and Chewbacca, to name a few, and I bring Rock outside so he can hang out with us. I’m careful not to put him underneath the plants, though, and he’s grateful. He doesn’t want his new friends to poop on him.

Together, we observe as the monarch caterpillars form green chrysalises, darken, and then break free to reveal wings of dazzling orange and black. Later in the season, a different type of butterfly visits my passion vine. The Gulf fritillary is sometimes known as the passion butterfly. On the outside, its wings are plain brown and pearly white, but when they open up their wings, they’re the sweetest tangerine color. Passion butterfly caterpillars aren’t cute like my monarchs. They’re dark and spiky, almost poisonous-looking, and their chrysalises are camouflaged to look exactly like dried-up leaves. But when I poke one, it wiggles and squirms, very much alive.

It seems dead, but it’s just in transition.

I wonder if it’s a metaphor for me. Am I also metamorphosing and changing into something better?