Metamorphosis
By Bridgitte Thao, 18, Minnesota
Can you hear the crisp pull of skin
peeling off my lips? My eyelids? My wrist?
Shedding is a common phenomenon,
if you’re a snake. If you’re a monarch.
I lose dermal layers to the wind,
rain, and earth—and yet I am none.
Cracking ‘til I’ve been stripped to bones.
To lonely veins. To odious ivory.
Is this what becomes of growing girls?
Of shooting stars? Of whole wide worlds?
My eczema gets pretty bad in the winter due to the cold air that dries out my lips. I wrote this poem earlier this year over the summer when my skin was still intact, but when I look back on this piece now, I feel a twang of empathy for my scared June self. Not only do I express dread at the thought of cracking lips, but I can’t seem to hold back my aversion for the whole process of “shedding.” Erosion, the changing of monarchs, snake-skin–it all scares me! This idea of “change” as a process of loss has haunted me since I’ve started writing, but I think I convey that best through this piece as I end with a gradual statement that extrapolates beyond the scope of myself. Although I write of corporeal loss (“stripped to bones”), the process of change can transform much more than one’s physicality; it can also carve away at one’s sense of self. The stability preceding change often feels like a loss to one’s life because the upset balance throws one’s world into a wholly unrecognizable schema. In a way, change is like death (albeit much scarier since one has to live with the aftermath). The problem of dry lips snowballs into a problem for the whole universe because both are constantly changing–and the little girl in all of us cannot do anything to stop it.
