The caterpillar was born
into a world that demanded hunger.
They told him, *consume or be consumed,*
so he bit into the first leaf
with the kind of desperation that only comes
from being told you’re not enough.
He felt the weight of the world on his back
whispers in the shadows,
judgment in the rustling leaves.
Chew faster, they seemed to say,
grow big, grow strong,
but don’t you dare crawl out of line.
And so he ate, and ate,
the green veins of the earth
ran dry beneath his touch,
his body swelling with each bite,
stuffed with survival,
with everything he was told to consume.
The flowers turned their heads,
the trees pulled away,
and still, he fed,
hoping to build a shell thick enough
to shield him from the world’s eye.
But even in the dirt,
he noticed
the way they adored the butterfly,
flying high on painted wings,
light and free.
Worshipped for its delicate beauty,
praised for what they saw as grace,
for its freedom,
for how it seemed to float above the ugliness
they had left for him to crawl through.
The same ones who flinched
at his slow crawl,
who scorned his hunger,
threw roses at the creature
The leaves tasted bitter now, dry and lifeless.
But that’s the only thing he has ever done.
His body swelled with hypocrisy,
each bite filled with the world’s scorn for what they demanded of him.
They adored the wings but spat on the process.
They loved the flight but feared the crawl.
No one ever talks about the cost
of becoming a butterfly.
The dark, suffocating cocoon,
the way the body has to break itself apart,
dissolve into nothing but instinct and memory
before wings ever know the sky.
He wondered,
if they knew he’d one day rise from the dirt,
would they still spit on him
as he crawled by?
Hunger was never pretty,
and the path to survival
was soaked in contradiction.
To reach the sky, he had to strip the world bare,
to tear it down just to build himself up.
He fed on the hypocrisy,
their love for what they could not understand,
on their blindness to the caterpillar
that eats just to live,
their worship of the butterfly
that they’ll never know.
They forgot the earthbound struggle,
the dirt, the hunger,
the breaking open
of a world and a body.
He looked around at the endless cycle,
at the creatures devouring and being devoured,
the praise for one form,
the disdain for another,
the never-ending hunger
to be something else,
to be loved in a different skin.
He could end it,
this endless suffering,
this cycle of hypocrisy,
where the world forces you to consume
only to hate you for it,
where it praises the beautiful,
but scorn the ugly process.
So he stopped.
Stopped devouring,
stopped trying to grow fat on survival,
and instead let the silence come.
He closed his eyes
and let the world’s judgments pass over him,
no longer caring for the wings,
or the form,
or what the world thought it wanted.
Because the cycle had to end somewhere,
and it wasn’t in the cocoon.
It was here,
At the moment,
where he chose
to be more than what the world asked of him,
neither beast nor butterfly,
neither hunger nor flight,
And in that stillness,
he found what he had never sought
not beauty,
not freedom,
but the quiet truth
that the world would never understand.
And that was enough.