32: butterflies

A month from now, I will be doing my hair for my rehearsal. I will be spending my last few hours as a fiancé before becoming a married woman. My life is filled with all sorts of butterflies.

Butterfly One: The dress
I tried on the wedding dress today. It has undergone its first set of alterations and no longer feels like a corset. A bit of my blue shoe peeks out the end of my shortened hem. My body shows its hourglass. My pieces are held in place. I'm convincing myself that it is okay to continue eating as normal.

The zipper is a frightening thing. It is tight. Very. Tight. With a tendency to stick at the top. This is fine, as it is not attached to my body's actually ability to fit into the dress. This is not fine, as I am afraid that it will take four people and me pressed against the floor to get the thing locked into place on the day of the wedding.

For now, I wait until the seamstress's phone call. I'll try it on again. I'll zip and unzip until it is all fine and nothing sticks.

Butterfly Two: The visa 
Joe still has not received his placement information for his teaching position next year. This means that for now, only I am in place to receive a visa.

This is fine, because he has another week. We're not leaving for Chicago until Monday. (We're leaving for Chicago on Monday!) This is not fine, because he may have to take an additional trip to Chicago. We can't afford this (in lots of ways).

For now, we wait for the package to arrive. We panic quietly, in the conversation's lulls late at night.

Butterfly and 300 other butterflies (no really)
When I was in Girl Scouts, we went on an overnight trip at a science center (COSI). We got caterpillars. We put sugar water on a cotton ball in their cardboard-and-plastic cases, were told to not move the box when their chrysalis formed, were told to feed it Kool Aid and sugar water when it became a butterfly.

I didn't have high expectations. The year before, I'd been given a tadpole. Three days later, I was screaming at the bus stop because no one else understood what loss was. No one else knew the pain of losing their first pet...which worked out okay, because shortly after Bud's small death we got a dog...which worked out terribly, because he ran away all the time and was taken back to the shelter after three months.

But this is the story of my butterfly. It became a butterfly. It lived for three weeks, spending its feeding time perched on my hand, sucking on a cotton ball, spending at least an hour a day flying around my room (then bashing and bashing and beating itself against my window). She would go back into her cardboard-and-plastic case. She would fly; she would eat; she would flick her tongue. Then one day, I knew she wasn't okay.

There is a picture of me that documents the moment of the butterfly's death. I am in my pajamas. My eyes are puffy. The butterfly is sitting on her cotton ball. She is not eating. She is dying. There is another moment, one that happened years later, that documents the mutual connection and kindred spirit I share with butterflies. I am sure of this.

We are on vacation. We are in a butterfly house near Niagara Falls. A butterfly lands on me. I cry a little and tell him that I love him. He flies away. I watch a swarm (a swarm?) of butterflies around the ceiling, swooping and floating in currents only they can feel.

My family took a day trip to Put In Bay yesterday. We visited a butterfly house, and I knew that this was what heaven looked like. I go into a sort of trance, watching them swirl. Watching them join thin bodies and make love–the only insect, I am sure, that makes love. Watching them open and close wings that are magic–magic that children know not to touch, like Mom's crystal and the toothpicks on our neighbor's dining room table when I was two.

They were everywhere. They were lovely. They made me fall in love with everything. Again.