Áslaug Íris Katrín Friðjónsdóttir: Spegilmynd / Mirror Image I Þula

 

"The caterpillar of the glasswing butterfly (Greta oto) is a singular entity. Like an infant who cannot yet distinguish contrasts, those places where black meets white. It wears a mirrored armour that is the perfect camouflage. It blends into its surroundings and becomes one with them. When a predator approaches, it sees nothing but its own reflection and the caterpillar is spared. Once transformed into a butterfly, it emerges with two wings. So you must choose which one you prefer. But be warned, for the reflection is never quite right. There’s always some distortion. You are forced to choose. The time when the child could learn every language in the world has passed.

You told me about a trip you took when you were a girl. You must have been a girl because you also told me that you were never a teenager. You slept in a room with a balcony, surrounded by another language. Your grandmother was in the next room and the world was waking up. In the hypnopompic state you heard a ticking, rhythmic sound that pried open your eyelids through your ears. Or perhaps that’s my description; maybe it’s too somatic. In any case, you were between sleep and waking. When you opened your eyes, you saw the biggest butterfly you’d ever seen, you told me. And the rhythm, it came from the butterfly. It was fluttering its wings just outside, or inside, the glass.

 

In days gone by, there were no teenagers; only children and adults. But that’s not why you were never a teenager; we’re not that old, it wasn’t in the distant past. And it was hasty of me to tell you about the caterpillar, the one that turned into a butterfly. Because the truth is that the caterpillar turned into a chrysalis, which then became a butterfly. The chrysalis is not a modern invention. It is a specialist term, protected by definition. Or it should be. But it gets forgotten, due to assumption, misunderstanding, or impatience.

 

You also told me about illuminated paintings in darkened galleries. The pastel hues trickled into the girly backpack, which you had forgotten was hanging from your shoulders and only now remembered. Maybe it was the music by the man who also composed Spiegel im Spiegel that brought it all back. Music you’re not sure whether you had forgotten or never remembered at all.

 

It’s because of that feeling that we leave cairns, you explain. We are forever in free fall, I reply urgently, we reach out, searching for something to hold on to, only to find it’s falling the same way. I feel philosophical, but I’m just as terrified. You second that and surprise me, for you can see things simultaneously from both above and below. You look down into the depths of the water but also see the flicker of light in the air as the sun’s reflection shifts on the surface. The boundary rests on the water’s surface; you have found that place I spoke of earlier, the threshold the infant first perceives. You cut into the turf, trace the lines, recall what it was like to feel for the first time. To have once been earth.

 

I tell you about the stones I found on the shore. Maybe I was a girl, maybe I was a teenager. They were glowing treasures, brightly coloured gems that faded on the nightstand, out of context, dry. The world is full of scattered stones, I say, heavy-hearted. Each of us holds meaning within the whole, but not outside of it; we are faded stones. But you comfort me again, just as the butterfly folds its wings. You remind me of the time the stone carries. Its journey through sea or land, its origin, fracture, the softened lines of experience. And you place carefully chosen stones at the crossing of paths; cairns as testimony to fleeting moments of shared understanding. Maybe it was I who was never a teenager. Maybe it was I who woke to ticking in a foreign room.

 

Then, the butterfly lifts its feet from the ground. It needs two wings to fly."