Have you ever had one of those moments where make a change — a very subtle change, like holding an apple differently as you eat it — and suddenly feel as though by this very small, practically unidentifiable change, that you are a totally new and different person entirely? That somehow, in some bizarre, inexplicable way, you are transitioning into a new world with a new identity, and everything in your life is changing all because of the turning of your wrist against the face of an upturned, insignificant apple core?

But you are entering a new world, and it has nothing to do with the apple. This simple change in jesture is a metaphor. It’s a metaphor for an actual, visible transformation you feel you have been dying to make your entire life, but were afraid to. The apple is you silently — no, it is you physically expressing your most profound and defined thoughts that have been suppressed within the confines of only your most private thoughts.

And now you are venturing into a world that is always mentioned, but that no one ever truly acknowledges. The future blazes gloriously before you, but the present remains a neverending past. You have been wanting to change for a while now you just… didn’t know where to start, or rather didn’t know how to start. “People don’t change,” They say. And if they don’t say it, they think it, and if they don’t think it you’ll still think they do because when have you ever actually seen someone change? I mean sure, plenty of folks will over time, but nobody in their right mind can just serendipedously up and change save their sanity come into question.

So you do it subtly. One small jesture at a time, hoping no one will notice the difference, even though your entire former psyche has gone out the window and has been abandoned there for quite some time. You play the part within a former shell, yearning to break-free, but you lack the heart. Because they “know you”, because they think you’re perfect “the way you are.” The way you were. The way you pretend to be.

Someone comes to sit beside you, and you turn the apple back around. You lean back into your worn outgrown shell. Because you know they’ve come to visit the caterpillar, not a moth.