CW: Brief suicidal ideation
In the bleak winter darkness, Jamie sent Marc, whom she loved with all her heart, out to the movies every Friday. They were otherwise cloistered in their small two bedroom apartment that January, thanks to the bitter cold and the cartoonishly high infection rate of Covid in Chicago.
“It’s the only way I can process my Goo state,” she explained.
Marc, ever the kind and understanding friend, donned his K95 and saw a lot of movies that winter. And Jamie took a lot of baths.
It was the only way to be comfortable in Goo form*.
*still a human, but the Goo is real. You’ll see.
Jamie was grieving. She had hoped that her job, her friends, and her potential graduate school acceptance letters would carry her through from caterpillar to butterfly, and the Goo state would be more of a medicated coma or spa vacation than a total deconstruction of one’s self and the world around them.
Alas, the job was on its last legs, the friends were isolating from the virus spike, and there were no acceptance letters in her inbox. There was nothing to distract from the reality that Jamie’s Boyfriend was no longer in her life in any capacity. Due to a circumstance he would/could not change*, Jamie had been forced to leave him in late December.
*please feel free to imagine why, and be sure to make it sad
It wasn’t a death, but it felt like it.
Their relationship had begun in tandem with the pandemic, and in the year and 7 months that followed, they never stopped talking. For a few hours here and there, maybe. But they spoke at length several times a day, though typically all day: “Good morning” to “Sleep well”. In the 591 days of mutual obsession, they corresponded for 9,456 hours, or 567,360 minutes. It was a love-bomb Pavlovian routine that felt indestructible.
But that was a part of the caterpillar’s life. Which was gone.
The hiccup between the impulse to share something with him, and the realization that the outlet is gone, was a small devastation to Jamie every time it happened. And it when she started to melt, it happened often.
She dove deep into her Goo solitude.
When alone, Jamie turned off all the lights, lit candles, and listened to spooky music in her Goo state. She gathered up her broken heart pieces and tossed them into a Topo Chico bottle, then slide into the bath. Half present, she’d watch them dance and swim in the carbonation as she melted along with the Teal’s Bubble Bath in her tub.
These Friday nights were a knock-off version of a sensory deprivation tank. She would cry and think and cry and think and cry and think.
The Goo State is heavy, physically and emotionally. It is wretched. It felt that, spiritually speaking, she was alive on an operating table.
Being Goo is as close to dying as you can get without actually dying.
Jamie looked up to the barely-up-to-code plastered bathroom ceiling.
I’ll kill myself in June, Jamie promised herself. I’ll put it off. At least by then I’ll know what to do. Or at least try to do. There will be some path. Or a clear “no path”. I have 5 months yet to live in Goo and see, I suppose.
Giving up on loving him was like peeling off her own finger nails. You have your fingerprints on so many things, as she thought of him, living his life in a completely new way without her. I have to scrub them off.
She could feel the pain of patriarchal control being excised from herself as she continued to melt. My mother and grandmother have never gone through this, she thought. Who am I without the road map of self esteem, via man’s approval?
Jamie didn’t want to give up hope that one day she could go back to being a caterpillar. As a caterpillar, she had loved fiercely and felt deeply. The avalanche of grief felt punitive. Holding on to expired love, clinging to the caterpillar past…
This is what made the Goo process excruciating.
Cover art by Alyssa Klash