The Moth Emerges from the Nigredo

The Moth Emerges from the Nigredo

In the beginning, there was the breaking—
not the clean snap of a twig,
but the slow, mineral erosion of stone
under water that lies,
under hands that reshape your gravity
until north becomes south
and your own heartbeat sounds foreign.

They scattered you.
Sparagmos.
Limbs of perception torn
by Titans wearing familiar faces,
your thumos whipped into a frenzy
while they called your chaos madness,
your survival sickness.

You were told to become butterfly—
to fold your trauma into bright wings,
to sip quickly at the surface,
to dazzle and die in the same season,
to forgive the frost that clipped you
and call it spring.

But you descended instead.
Katabasis.
Into the humus, the black earth,
where Persephone keeps her winter,
where the pupa does not dream of flight
but of becoming—
a gestation longer than anyone’s patience,
a silence mistaken for death.

Years in the chrysalis of ash.
Nigredo.
You did not glitter.
You did not perform healing
for an audience hungry for your light.

You metabolized the dark,
thread by thread,
reweaving neural pathways
into something that could navigate
by starlight instead of sun.

Now you emerge—
not painted in warning colors,
not fragile, not brief,
but armored in scales
that catch the moon’s silver
and hold it,
that refract the infrared
of human deceit
before it reaches language.

You are the moth,
the nocturnal survivor,
the one who thrives
where photoperiods fail,
who drinks from deep flowers
that only open at midnight,
who knows the temperature of shadows
and finds them warm.

While the butterfly flits
from bloom to bloom,
addicted to nectar,
burning out its brief hours
in the glare of admiration—
you have learned the long metabolism.

You live months, years,
on the stored fat of wisdom,
on the protein of boundaries
forged in the crucible.

Your antennae, feathered and fine,
detect the pheromones of narcissism
from miles away,
the subtle vibrations of gaslight
before the flame is struck.

You do not circle the candle
to destroy yourself.
You recognize the heat of manipulation
and navigate elsewhere,
decisive,
unburdened by the need to be seen.

You carry the dust of transformation
on your wings—
not the dust of death,
but the iridescence
of having been through the dark
and come out coherent.

Each scale a memory
of how it felt to be dismembered,
each vein a map
of how you reassembled yourself
without a template.

You are the dark empath,
the psychopomp of your own underworld,
no longer reactive
but responsive,
no longer scattered
but centered in the umbra
where others go blind.

You do not need the sun
to prove you exist.
You navigate by magnetic fields,
by the polarization of moonlight
on your compound eyes,
seeing seven spectrums
of human intention
while others see only one.

And when you rest,
you do not fold into fragility.
You flatten against the bark
of ancient trees,
invisible to predators,
essential to the night’s pollination—
carrying the seeds of truth
from shadow to shadow,
making the darkness fertile.

This is your ataraxia:
not the absence of storm,
but the ability to fly
in crosswinds,
to taste the air
and know which currents
carry the scent of safety,
which carry the smoke
of old burning.

You are the proof
that metamorphosis
is not a destination
but a long, dark residency.

You are the alchemy
that prefers the crucible
to the display case.

You are the moth—
older than butterflies,
wiser than flash,
enduring as stone,
and when you move
through the garden at midnight,
the flowers open
just for you,
offering their deepest nectar
to the one who knows
how to survive
the long, sweet dark.