words like these.

pupa.

Luna presented on a moth's life cycle towards the end of the school year. Naturally, her area of focus was the Luna Moth. She stood in front of the class and shared the facts she found with a pointer while reading off of a slide she made herself. It turns out that there are enough things that grow in the dark that growth can happen in the dark. A moth or a butterfly, for example, grows in the dark. A friend tells me that a butterfly doesn't know it's a butterfly before it leaves the cocoon. It still thinks it's a shapeless blob. This lets the breath I've been holding in my chest leave my body, and with it, maybe a little bit of the nameless dread caught in my torso, too. I put the words Luna Moth into my phone, and a list of symbologies emerge. Evidently, the spiritual significance of a Luna Moth is many. In their one week of life, they undergo a powerful transformation. My favorite outlines the brevity of their lifespan being in ultimate service of love. They literally do nothing more than love and die. Our favorite Physician's Assistant visits us today while we're at the hospital. He confirms that we can go home next week. The appointment took a few hours, and I felt like crying for most of it. I don't know the word for the type of sadness, but whatever it is, it must also include a type of longing that falls outside of anything here or lost. And then I remember the Portuguese word saudade, and again, my body releases something it's been carrying, like air from a balloon. Like the inner lining of a coat, foreign material has been sewn into this time's complexity. I've been wearing it like skin. Where I've gone mining for meaning in the binaries of this soupy medicalized world, I cannot anymore understand words like better. Six letters. Two syllables. Shapeless. When I was in labor with Luna, all of a sudden, it felt like the contractions had no ending or beginning. I remember calling out, Why aren't they stopping? Our Doula, Holly, gently rested her hand on mine and said, You're in transition. Because with Rafi, we were in emergency surgery before I was able to reach that stage of labor, I didn't know what transition would feel like. But it feels like you're dying. Or something is dying. It feels like missing a step on a steep staircase in a dream and being jolted awake with the feeling of falling but still between worlds with no real idea of what happens next. Or what would have happened next if I had stayed asleep in the other place. We prepared for this for many months. For Fonz's cells to be destroyed and then rebuilt. We had to leave our life. Had to find a way to make sense of chaos and fear and death and sickness and separation. Or at least we had to face it. Nothing really makes sense in the middle of a life cycle. And then it happened. Now, we must go to the next place and make new shapes in the sky with these new wings.