Dragonflies, Adoption, and Overnight Transformation

I watched two dragonflies smash each other against a branch sticking out of the murky water’s edge the other day, and I’ve been thinking about them ever since.

They would hover above the branch and then suddenly drop down, seemingly smashing into it only to bounce back into flight, hover, fly around, still attached, only to return and to smash down again. I thought they were in battle, perhaps, and that one had locked onto the other and they were fighting for their lives. I thought they were playing, perhaps, and that this was what dragonflies called fooling around. Finally, after maybe fifteen minutes of this flying and smashing, they disengaged and flew their separate ways.

I went home to look up videos about dragonflies on YouTube.

When dragonflies mate, the male has these Edward Scissorhands pincers on the end of his body that hook around a female’s neck when it is mating time. The male keeps the female hooked until he has done his business and then the hooked female has to bob over water or land somewhere, still hooked, and lay her eggs. Somewhere in there the males scoops whatever any other male had shot up into her because, well, you’re smart. I don’t need to say much more about this.

When males aren’t doing this work, they are flying around, protecting their territory from invading males. There hotties are mine, the flying male is saying. Stay the hell away. Get your own girls.

This isn’t the good part about dragonflies. I just had to get that off my chest. I heard someone say recently that life is half bad and half good.

Here’s the good.

Before dragonflies are themselves, they are nymphs—underwater creatures that don’t even look like a distant cousin to the winged creature they will later become. They hang out and eat tadpoles and mosquito larvae and other things you (hopefully) can’t get at In and Out Burger until the day comes when something makes them crawl out of the water onto a blade of grass or whatever is out of the water pointing skyward, and Alien happens in your local pond. The exoskeleton splits open, and the dragonfly, which had been telescoped into this small outer shell, unfolds and unfolds, until it is fully itself. Its wings are seemingly birthed, too, in a dramatic unfolding.

I may not be saying what happens completely correctly, so forgive me. I am not a scientist. I am a woman who is reeling from time she spent at the lake and some Youtube videos she watched a bunch of times.

Here, see for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlfXSe0wyUs

This past year I have been so focused on the change cycle that the caterpillar goes through to become a butterfly, most particularly square one, as Marth Beck calls it, where the caterpillar turns to soup inside a chrysalis of its own making. I have developed a theory that many adopted people stay in square one in some aspects of their entire life as they never get a chance to recover from the catalytic event of relinquishment and find a sense of an honest self. So I’ve been living with that not exactly empowering thought.

What if we’re inside the shell of our coping-mechanism self, fully formed. What if one day that shell gets so damn tight and dry it spontaneously splits open and we unfold?

I don’t know.

But my body says: yes.