The Caterpillar

If you've ever read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, you know that any one of us can transform from a creepy little bug into a beautiful butterfly. Cute, right? But that's not the whole story. 

First of all, don't knock the caterpillar. Sure, butterflies are cool, but they can't snuggle under a leaf when it rains, or grip the earth beneath their little legs, or arch their back toward the sky and stretch. Caterpillars mostly just walk around minding their own business. Eating a leaf here, a leaf there. They're picky, you know? Some leaves taste better than others. All the caterpillar does is eat and grow, eat and grow. It sounds like a great life, actually. 

But at some point, when they're good and plump, they just feel that it's time to hang upside down and wiggle out of their own skin. So they do it, which, if you think about it, is weird. They're enjoying the freedom of caterpillar life, the only life they've ever known, and they decide to make themselves vulnerable—soft and writhing and faceless—until their body forms a hard shell. No one even tells them to do it; they just do it. It's weird.

If this were a storybook, we'd see an image of a colorful butterfly easily exiting the chrysalis, its wings spreading wide. If you paid extra, the wings might even pop out awkwardly. Turn the page, and the creature is flying across solid blue paper, interrupted only by the crease. It's a nice story, if you're into that sort of thing. But it's not true. 

Do you know what really happens in that chrysalis? It's crazy. The caterpillar starts to dissolve—dissolve! Everything that it was– its legs, its skin, its little beady eyes, its tiny caterpillar brain–melt into goo. The caterpillar turns into soup. But it’s not like your grandmother making Pasta Fagioli, or whatever soup your grandmother made. This soup-making process is grotesque. 

It reminds me of something that I read on the internet back when Tumblr was cool, and it's been stuck in my head ever since. There was this guy in the Mexican Cartel nicknamed El Pozolero, or The Soup Maker. Because, brace yourself, he would dispose of his victims by dissolving them in acid. Horrible. Disgusting. The stuff of nightmares. And…kinda what happens to that little caterpillar, except it's alive for the whole thing. 

Now, this will probably affect your ability to enjoy Pozole, a delicious Mexican stew, as it has mine, but I can't help but imagine the caterpillar dissolving in the same way—going from something tangible into something completely unrecognizable but made from all the same stuff. I feel like this often.

What do you think the caterpillar feels as it's dissolving? Is there a point when it says to itself, 'Holy shit, I'm dissolving'? Or does it happen so slowly that it barely notices? Does it feel like being in a warm bubble bath, a burning fire, or nothing? Or do you think it’s like that moment right before sleep, when the mind is momentarily aware that the body is sleeping? Do they jolt like they're falling? It must be scary. To dissolve everything you are, everything you have been, and become stew. To sit in the dark, jiggling.

Maybe it feels like the first time I tried another kind of acid. I cried uncontrollably, sitting in the dark on a lower bunk in a damp cabin for either one minute or ten hours–I'll never know. I didn't exist–time and space collapsed, and everything I understood about the world disappeared. The walls, and a very chatty tree outside, spoke to me. I was no longer myself. I was no longer anything. 

I did not like it.

The next time—because, well, you know—after drinking a bottle of wine and staring at the inside wall of a port-o-potty for who knows how long, I huddled alone in my tent listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the NPR News Quiz on headphones at full volume, desperately clinging to any thread of Peter Sagel shaped reality. 

I'm pretty sure this is what the caterpillar feels like…a nerd listening to NPR on drugs, a drunk lost in time in a port-o-potty, a kid crying inside a damp cabin with undulating walls. The caterpillar is destroyed. 

What happens next is that the soup starts becoming something new–a creature forged from stew. Parts are rearranged and rebuilt; a new brain, new little eyes, and the pattern of their budding wings start pressing against the side of their makeshift coffin.

It's not a sure thing. The soup is the perfect nest for wasps to lay their eggs. A storm can knock the chrysalis down to its inevitable destruction. And sometimes, it just fails. Nothing happens.

If it does survive, when it's ready, and it just knows when it's ready, it pushes itself out of the chrysalis. It looks like you'd expect something to look after it was dissolved and then put back together—beat up, wrinkled, and wet with a giant belly and limp folded wings. It pumps its butterfly blood into its veins and hangs upside down for a while. The last time it was conscious, it didn't have giant appendages and its not easy to get used to. The first flight is rough. And short. 

But once their wings are dry enough to fly for real, they suddenly exist in a new reality with the earth moving beneath them. This is not a caterpillar that grew wings. It is something entirely new, made from its own dissolved caterpillar remains. It will never munch on leaves or crawl along a stick in the afternoon sun again. 

What a ride—to be a bug, then Pozole, and then awaken as something totally new and unfamiliar, and have to learn how to be that new thing. Do you think the butterfly ever misses being a caterpillar? Does it long for simpler times? Does it wonder where it would be if it hadn't followed its instinct and instead stayed in its skin? It surely would have grown into a bigger, stronger, smarter caterpillar. But it would never have seen the tops of the trees, and the way the leaves look like brothers and sisters fluttering in the wind. 

But it doesn't matter. All of it is part of being a caterpillar. It's part of being anything. It sucks being soup. But it sucks more to be an old caterpillar, nursing a warm beer and imagining the view from the sky. I guess that story doesn’t make a very good pop-up book. But it’s probably the book we all need to read.