03/10/2026
CHRYSALIS
There is a moment
when the body you have carried can no longer hold.
The truth you are becoming folds into itself, a small, trembling shelter.
Call it chrysalis — Call it the place no one sees.
Inside, the world you knew begins to soften.
Bones melting, old forms slide off your skin.
Old strengths dissolve into liquid.
You are unmade.
And it hurts — God, it hurts.
Not the wound of breaking alone,
but the ache of rearrangement,
the quiet tearing of a life
the sacred dissolving of fragments
of who you are yet to meet, gathering in the shadows,
insisting on their right to exist.
The pain was not the ending.
It was the architecture of your becoming.
With trembling hands you struggle — as necessary things often feel cruel.
Your old self resists them. Fears them!
Fights the shape of the wings
forming in your darkness.
But still, they rise. Still, they gather.
Still, they build you a new body
around a center that remembers the fight.
Death itself is a chrysalis.
Decay is a chrysalis.
The painful in-between is a chrysalis —
a seed cracking open underground,
a former self dissolving into a chrysalis
New life finds its shape.
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Acrylic on canvas. 75 × 85 in. 2026.
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Victor Olaoye
