Chrysalis

“And the skeleton, ever the frail and solemn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.”

For years, her body belonged to childhood.

It was a creature of scraped knees and loose limbs that climbed trees: running with its skirt high against the wind as it frolicked across the grass field, never watching her steps too carefully nor thinking about how it moved. A small performer that loved to be embellished in dresses and play princess, looking forward to show-and-tell sessions with plastic tiaras and glittering shoes ceremoniously displayed. A light and careless presence that passed easily through the world without being looked at too closely.

When it stared into the mirror, a toothy grin would form, small gaps marking the tributes that it had offered to the tooth fairy. It would lean close to the glass, baring its teeth proudly, tugging the corners of its lips wider just to see the missing spaces again. The head tilted left, then right, studying the small changes with curiosity. Each gap was a powerful step in its accumulation of riches, expedited by the regular consumption of microwaved shredded cheese and dà bái tù nǎi táng (unbeknownst to any parents). On the nights when small offerings were eagerly tucked beneath the pillow, it would wake to find a crisp $2 note waiting in its place.

In front of the mirror, it stood loosely, with one hip crooked and shoulders slouched forward without thinking. Sometimes it balanced on the balls of its feet, swaying slightly as if the body were too light to stay still for long. Arms hung wherever they pleased: dangling, folded, occasionally flapping out in exaggerated poses just to see the reflection mimic them. It sprawled across couches, crouched low to the ground, climbed onto counters to peer into mirrors from strange angles. When it stood, it leaned. When it leaned, it twisted. The spine bent easily, like something still soft enough to be reshaped by movement.

 January 26th, 2015 

The day it first felt wrong.

It had walked past the mirror absentmindedly, the way it always had. But this time, its reflection seemed to enter the room a few seconds before the mind caught up. It stopped.

The body in the mirror looked unfamiliar. Stretched somehow, uneven, like a drawing that had been pulled too far at the edges. Its limbs felt longer, as if they had grown overnight without asking permission. Clothes sat differently on its shoulders, and sleeves that once swallowed its wrists now ended awkwardly halfway down its arms. Its posture wavered like a caterpillar hanging in a quiet J-shape, suspended between one form and the next.

Its eyes moved slowly over the reflection, examining the stranger who had wandered into the room.

Were my teeth always so big when I smiled?

Did my stomach always push against the waistband like that when I breathed?

Since when did my shoulders stick out past the seams of my shirt?

It turned sideways, and the mirror followed. It straightened its back. Then hunched. Then pulled its arms close to its sides. Each adjustment felt like trying to fold itself into a shape that no longer existed, like smoothing out wrinkles in fabric that had already been cut into something new. Its shoulders lifted, then dropped. Its spine curved inward, then tried again to lengthen. It tilted its head and shifted its weight from one foot to the other, studying the unfamiliar outline from every angle as it searched for the version it remembered. It hoped the mirror might reveal the instructions it had somehow missed. How to stand…how to place its arms… how to occupy this lengthened frame without feeling awkward inside it.

The body had carried her through childhood – across grass fields and muddy playgrounds, up the branches of tall trees and down the narrow hallway at home, through crowded school corridors and along the cracked pavements of the familiar walk back from the park. It had carried her through scraped knees and wind-tangled hair, through running too fast and laughing too loudly, through days when movement came as easily as breathing. Even when she had forgotten about her lactose intolerance or wrestled too hard with the other children, the body carried her still, holding the soreness with an unrelenting determination to keep her moving through the world.

Now, it was too much for her to carry.

November 5th, 2018

When her grandfather died, his body broke apart and returned itself piece by piece to the earth.

Until then, she had gone about her days with the quiet certainty that bodies would endure forever. They scraped against pavement and healed themselves. Teeth loosened and fell out only to be replaced. Skin bruised, darkened, and then returned again to its ordinary color. The body seemed to repair whatever happened to it, patiently restoring itself each time.

But her grandfather’s body did not repair itself…it simply stopped. The body that once lingered in kopitiams over black coffee and Hainanese chicken rice, bantering playfully with his wife from across the table as he filled pages with homemade exercise books for his children. The body that was driven by a passion for lifelong learning, occupying itself on weekdays with scholarly books and dog-eared novels whilst pausing occasionally to tune in to the news. The body that would always raise its hand for a high-five before the grandchildren left the house, pressing candy and Fujiya Peko-Poko chocolates into their palms as it indulged in their squeals of delight. Just like that, it was rendered unmoving, emptied of the vivacity it had once carried through rooms and across streets.

She tried to imagine what that meant.

At night she pictured his body the way it pictured the dry husks of insects that clung to tree bark in the summer: the shape of something that had once been alive, left behind after the creature inside had already gone elsewhere. The thought frightened her at first, but she returned to the image often, turning it over slowly until it began to feel less frightening than the alternative. She reassured herself with the thought that her grandfather had not vanished, but had simply taken on another form and embarked on a new life somewhere she could not yet see. It comforted her to imagine him continuing on, walking through unfamiliar places and breathing different air as his spirit lived on in a body she would never recognize.

As her own body seemed to split and dissolve, she began to wonder if bodies were always doing this. Always changing in ways too slow for the fallible human eye, amidst an ecosystem of constant undoing. Perhaps they were forever shedding themselves, layer by layer, akin to how leaves fall from trees.

Maybe this was what living truly meant? An endless exchange in which cells fade and new ones arrive. Old selves dissolve into the next quietly and without ceremony, never announcing the moment of their passing, The body she carried today was already becoming another, even as she lived inside it. Bones were renewing and skin was loosening its hold on yesterday, breath following breath as if each one carried a slightly different version of her forward. Little by little, the body would slip away until it exists only as a memory carried somewhere deep inside her. All she could do was move with the tempo of time.

July 10th, 2021

She did not know if the heart could try to piece itself back together again. It was an absurd feeling: every organ inside her was still intact, yet it felt as if something had burst into a thousand splinters.

In retrospect, the aforementioned phrasing feels crudely predictable, almost embarrassingly overused. But the sensation itself had ironically been marked by a singular helplessness. Outside, the distant murmur of a neighbor’s radio threaded softly through the walls, whilst the engine of a car passed by in a low, fading groan. The walls didn’t shift, the light didn’t flicker…the room held absolutely steady, revolving in quiet compliance with the world beyond its humble sphere. Meanwhile, glass shards shifted against her ribcage, pressing in with every breath as they rearranged the space within. It was the startlingly lonely fact of being one against a collective hum of life that continued with offensive indifference.

On the screen, the call had ended, rendering the contact of her former lover a residue that lingered cruelly on the glowing surface. The shapes that had once been indistinguishable from forever started to blur, the letters loosening and slipping out of focus as the pale light wavered beneath her gaze.

In its earliest form, it was not yet love. Only a quiet arranging of small compartments within herself. There was a low, hollowed space filled with the hush of darkness, where stars gathered and settled like fine dust, pressed gently into the lining of her chest. Another grew wild and uncontained — hope tangled and overreaching, its stems pushing insistently against the walls. And beneath it, a smaller hollow where joy rested, cupped and steady.

But something larger gathered itself over time. Warm terracotta walls rose slowly, holding a soft, imagined sun that spilled gently across a narrow balcony edged with iron. A wind vane turned lazily in a long, dimming hour, its slow rotation catching and loosening thin shreds of light that frayed gently at the edges. Sheltered within the house, a porch extended outward into open air, meeting the sky at its edge. A linen couch rested there, its fabric worn sufficiently to hold a trace of warmth. Beyond, a small stretch of lawn lay still, bordered by a low gate and a few scattered blooms, their shapes softening as the light faded. The neighboring houses stood close but quiet, their windows dim, their presence receding into the evening.

There was always just enough room for two figures to sit shoulder to shoulder, saying nothing as they observed the steady, enveloping hush of night settle around them.

Now, she watched the girl on the bed fold inward. Her gaze followed the slow curvature of a spine drawn tight, vertebrae stacking one into the next until her forehead hovered just shy of her knees. Fingers pressed hard into her arms, nails biting through fabric as if trying to anchor something slipping loose beneath the surface. Breath came unevenly — caught, stuttered, then breaking apart entirely, before unguarded whimpers escaped beyond containment. There was no elegance in it, no narrative to soften its edges. Only a raw, graceless unraveling, stripped of form, of distance, or of anything that might make it bearable to witness.

When she returned to herself, it was through the quiet insistence of the body: the dull pressure of the mattress beneath her, the faint tremor in her hands, the rough drag of fabric against her fingertips, the ache along her spine, the slow, pulsing throb at her temples. A reluctant coherence stitched together by sensation, as though the body had continued in her absence and was now allowing her back in, inch by inch.

And somewhere beneath it all, the rooms remained. Their walls no longer held clean lines; the terracotta had cracked, the balcony leaned at a sharper angle, the wind vane stuttered against an unsteady sky. The porch still opened outward, though the space it offered had narrowed, its edges less certain. It was something that would have to be rebuilt, unevenly and imperfectly, out of whatever fragments that had not yet given way.