Kimimi's Tale (from the Psyche Chronicles)

I spilled out of a tiny purse in a sea of other green writhing commas. We hatched on the underside of a leaf where no one would notice and cascaded into the green planky sea below. Rolling around blind, trying to get a purchase on something, we sought a personal island of leaf to claim for a base station from which to survey and form a strategy. How to get enough to eat in a population explosion of four or five hundred siblings? Most of us would be supped up before sunset by hummingbirds and black phoebes who knew to watch the plates of leaves for their meals. There we were, spread like an avalanche of green caviar and all they had to do was dive down and scoop. How I avoided the bird squadron I have no idea but when I finally peeped from under the canopy I saw that there were probably only half of us left and it wasn’t even noon. Time to suck some green juice out of the stem and then attach to it like another leaf node. Might fool a few birds. Thankfully the human didn’t notice me when she plucked some of the choicest leaves for her basket. The rest of the time I watched a most harrowing scene of destruction as she mashed the remaining green commas luxuriating on the green strings of their leaves. They lay fat and disgraceful in the sun with their mouths stuck to what was left of a leaf, drunk, unable to crawl into a shadow to sleep it off.  

By luck I avoided numerous incursions by birds and the gardener, including a rank-smelling rain that she sprinkled over me. I knew not to take one sip. All around me the green commas were dropping off and writhing in the dirt. They had had a fine short life, eating to their heart’s content while I cowered under a chard leaf and ventured out to eat only in the earliest light. Despite my attempts at weight control I grew quite thick through the middle and found it hard to move fast when the bird shadows dropped over the garden. I did my best to strike a pose as much like a stem as I could muster. When I twisted my head to look back I could see that I had acquired some sun spots that were the same color as the speckled lettuce leaves where I had made my most recent bower. I discovered that if I moved around to different plants I would not be so easily noticed. By now it was clear that I had outlived all the green siblings that had begun life with me. There were other creatures I shared this jungle with but in general I saw them before they saw me. Crawling around was becoming difficult though. I seemed to be getting more and more rotund.

One day I tiptoed to the far end of a stalk to reach the newest tender leaves and found that I could not loop around and find my way back. The stem was wobbling in the breeze and my weight seemed to be contributing to the bounce. I could not get footing and experienced the most devastating attack of vertigo. Then found myself vomiting at both ends. It was truly the most humiliating loss of control and dignity. I had been struggling with my body image for some time already, all the extra rings of green blubber that were growing on me and making me sluggish and stupid. It worried me how I was becoming increasingly dull in the head and not concerned nearly enough with survival. Then this loss of control. I was so ashamed I felt paralyzed. I couldn’t drag myself to the end of the stalk where I might dangle out to another platform. 

Next thing I knew I was being wrapped in strings and tied to the stem. Who was doing this? I was so startled by the sensation of wrapping I turned my head as much as I could but the tail of my long, no longer slender body was not visible. I saw only the white of a winding sheet. Why this word even was known to me I can’t tell you. The most horrifying of all was the realization that my own hind quarters were busy winding the fibers into a suffocating blanket that trapped all fifty-eight of my feet and was already holding down my shoulders. I pulled against it but it was tight and anchored. I don’t know if you can remotely comprehend the confusion I felt. A nether part of my body was engaged in spinning strong filaments and wrapping them around and over and above me and I was not even aware of doing this or how it came to start. Now it was accelerating and the fibers were growing thicker around all parts of me. Pretty soon the sunlight was blocked and I couldn’t turn my head. 

I was forced to lie in complete stillness within this fibrous skin. I could feel warmth filling the cavity. The sun bathed me in a most delicious pale glow with silver glints from the irregular thicknesses of the wrapping threads. There was something comforting about this enclosure after all. It bundled me firmly but not uncomfortably, with contours for all of my bulges and excess weight. I could relax, or so it seemed, since I imagined that no birds could see me now. I might be a white blip on a stem, maybe mistaken for a dried leaf. In any case, since I couldn’t move I was stuck there. This brought a bitter taste to my mouth as I knew I had to resign myself to an unknown fate despite the luxurious accommodations. 

No one had taught me what to expect in the life of a caterpillar. I was thrown into the green leafy world without knowledge of any passages I might have to endure.  My thoughts wound round and round in this sort of questioning. How had I caused myself to make a prison around my body? Was this a punishment for growing so large? Was I to starve here and join the leaf mulch in the garden? I could not fathom how the fibers that now held me had come from my own body with no awareness. Part of me still pictured that I had been captured by an army of vindictive spiders who found sport in weaving a net around a helpless large creature. But there was no denying that I myself had created this wrapping and now was in charge of getting out of it, should I wish to keep living. As these thoughts swirled I began to feel light-headed and out of breath and at the same time deliciously warm and comforted. You can’t imagine how tired I would get in the garden managing fifty-eight feet. Here I didn’t need them. I thought about my last taste of the herbs that were the most refined delicacy I had found. Their scent permeated my golden chamber and my thoughts drifted. I didn’t stay awake to feel the sun sink out of sight.  

When I woke it was cold, lightless and very lonely. How long had I slept? I heard crisp cracklings around me, nearly inside the case with me. Everything seemed louder, especially when I tried to turn over and air my feet. Then the most awful realization came. My feet were gone. Now I knew that something was punishing me. This was a chamber of torture that I could not escape alive. Even in the chill it still felt soft and cozy but when I realized I had been maimed while asleep I became distraught and struggled against the walls. There was no way to break them. I was just turning and turning, losing all sense of direction.

Something clamped onto me and I felt even more fibers covering me, winding and winding in the dark, drawing me down, down, down, cutting off my thoughts and impulses, winding me into a nothing. I could not fight back. I was pressed down farther and farther into the narrow dark. I felt the last perimeters of my bumpy body squeezed and erased. There was nothing of me left. You are no doubt wondering how I came to know this if there was nothing left, not even my thoughts. I agree it sounds rather preposterous. I did not see or think about this nothing, it just became, and since I was nothing, not even a thought left for a green bite of something, I melted away even out of the case. I was as dark as the night inside and out. I became something else, a field of no impulses, no desires. I turned inside the darkness like water flowing, dark thick limbless water. Something else was moving me. I had no choice but to give in to it. 

Everything seemed to have grown enormous and I could see and feel between the particles of the twine that once wrapped me. I could flow into these spaces that seemed as distant as stars. I felt big as the night that covered the garden and bigger still when I saw that the garden was not the biggest world of plants. There were taller and more hardened plants with rough trunks and loud hissing branches. I flowed in and around them without wishing to land anywhere. I now saw that the dark I was part of stretched as far as I could see. I couldn’t perceive myself except as the dark everywhere I looked. I was seeing myself in every direction. I filled this quiet and decorous night.

Now I was above trees and could see back down to the garden where my little white tube was fraying on the dried stem. I had a passing memory of lying in that cradle and struggling until I slept, feeling everything I knew as me bleed into the soft wrapping threads. But now that I was broad as the sky my thoughts took such a different shape. They felt like visions not originating in me but all that I could see happening far from where I was. I saw every other creature in the universe and could sense all occurrences at once, all the time. You can see why it is impossible to describe this to a human in their language since by the time I even mention one thing the billions of other things happening at the same time have already passed and there is no catching up, ever. So let me just say that I still perceive in this way, even now, in this new body that finally found its form in the dawn.

How long I traveled giant as the night I don’t know. All through that night I had the sensation of every instant full of the multiplicity of events and I could choose where to view or investigate and then move quickly to the next even if it was in another part of the universe entirely. I had all of this within me. And still can you believe I was hungry to know more? How was I able to see all this? Who or what made it happen? It couldn’t be me, even though I had seen myself wind the threads that put me in the case to begin with. Would I ever stumble on the answer in the vast sea of happenings? My time of confinement was in the past but wondered if I could visit the past? Could know other creatures trapped and dissolved like myself? All sorts of fanciful wishes rushed through my mind even as I was feeling the majesty of being as immense as night, every crevice filled with awareness.

So onward the night or nights went like this. I was night, I knew only night. When light finally came it was a raw, sudden dawning. I cringed. A dim sun rolled up, settled into a new alcove low to the earth. There it swelled until light split out. Its gleam touched me like a blade. My little case cracked open. How much the brightness stabbed my eyes and heart since you can imagine I had gotten used to living in the dark. This new substance felt poisonously strong. It soaked up my giant body, made it disappear faster than a breath. How is that possible, when I was the dark and the whole world as I knew it? 

What was left of me, you ask, my body overcome by the drench of daylight? I felt delicate feet like tiny hairs tickling somewhere. I saw wrinkled wings above me. Long strings twirled in front of me testing the new molten air. I couldn’t fathom that the slick black wings were attached to me. They moved when I breathed. Every color was in them, turquoise and green, gold, red, violet. They glinted in this new light, and my round tube of a body had slimmed into sections. This was the very last drop in my memory of the chubby caterpillar who preceded me. 

Now what about these wings, with their long tails, silver rims, piercing red eyes, blue-white dots along the ruffled edges? Realizing that I was such an extravagant creature swept all else out of my mind. From the center of my being I stretched toward the light. My wings were still damp but the sun gave them strength and shape. The space that had been all of me for my time in the dark was now a sea underneath me. I pounded my sparkling wings upon it and lofted beyond the reach of the sun, beyond the northern trees where the ice begins. When I grew tired I floated down and down and down into the summer air of the green world to meet what other creatures might dwell there.

You ask, do I ever revisit the garden? Do I know about the eggs I carry, what might become of them? Do I think of anything besides sailing on the warm air? No, I do not. Only because you happened to see me land and rest, never intending to stay, have you heard my tale, all I know of life so far. 

Some say the cost of having this glorious body is that I will lose it. I have already paid dearly for it--what further punishments must I endure? They say it is merely on loan. I heard no intimations of this in all my night wanderings. Such a time must be long ahead, known only when it comes. 

Today the sun lifts me toward shiny leaf platforms where my infinite wings will glitter through the night.