March 4, 2011, a little before 5:00 am, I am sitting in my living room in Montreal, with fountain pen in hand and a writing pad in my lap, ready to start a conversation with myself before my husband wakes up. We have this ritual that we started when we got married in 1983. Every morning we wake up at 5:30 to have coffee together and read the paper until 6:30, when it’s time to get ready for our different schedules. On the days that I wake up earlier I try to write a bit, sort of have a conversation with myself. For those of you who haven’t come across my previous writings, let me just mention that I love pens, especially fountain pens. I belong to the old school, I write with fountain pen first and then type and edit on the computer. My muse comes with the smell and the flow of the ink on the blank paper. I am crazy, I know, but who among us is not passionate about something in one way or another? Anyways, things are not going well for me lately and today morning as I turn my pen in my hand I notice the chrysalis carved on the nib and it hits me. Right now, at this moment in time, I am that chrysalis.
The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary defines a Chrysalis as ‘the pupa of certain insects especially butterflies and moths at the state between caterpillar or larva and fully developed imago,’ while in the Reader’s Digest Universal Dictionary a Chrysalis is ‘a pupa, a state of development, a transitional state.’
And finally, according to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary a Chrysalis is ‘a form taken by an insect during the torpid stage of its life (between the time when it creeps or crawls as a larva and the time when it flies as a moth, butterfly).’
I have lived most of my life in Lebanon and Dubai. In 2006, I left the Middle East for good and immigrated to Canada, with my husband and two teenage children. Four and a half years later, my kids both well into their studies in university, I still don’t have my dream job. On top of that things happened to me, to us, that I never imagined or dreamed of. But hey I am alive, I have my family and I have a country I can call home and I know that whatever happens on the political level, I will still be able to live with some dignity and freedom. And until I find what I am looking for I would like to think of myself as a chrysalis in a metamorphic stage, undergoing internal changes. After much creeping and crawling, I believe that the day will come when I will emerge from this uncertain state as a beautiful butterfly. And as William Du Bois put it:
“A budding writer could not emerge from his pupa too soon.”
ChK
The Chrysalis might be confining now but you have to believe when the time is ripe you will get out and soar.
Thanks Verkin, I do hope so.
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