Small

Small

It’s small: my birthplace growing-up-place hometown world, whatever you call it. A small town, full of small people filling their small lives with small things. Unsurprisingly then, I too, am small. At least, that’s what I grew up thinking.

I never much wanted the smallness, but I seem to need it. Whatever I do, it’s there: following, hunting; wherever I go, it’s ahead of me; waiting round every corner, ready to pounce. I fight it, yet in spite of my best efforts something about me persists in being small. It’s as though a rash of smallness pervades my every cranny, my every nook. Like an infection smallness burrows beneath my skin, wriggles through my veins, osmoses into my cells, grows, multiplies, mutates and spreads. Smallness is my disease. Some would say it’s my addiction.

I have tried to escape, but inevitably the smallness catches up with me: knockings on my head, whisperings in my ear. I let it in, beg it not to leave. The pressure grows. I’ve started to crack. I recently noticed a slight expansion in my head, not much, but enough. My skin has grown taughter, wrinkles reverting back to the skin of my youth, the skin of my youth stretching, growing thinner. Small rips have started to form around my eyes. The pressure forces the smallness to ooze from the cuts, dripping, flowing down caressing the contours of my face and finally falling to the floor to evaporate and join every other lost dream or false hope ever carried on a raft of tears. I, like everyone else who tries to escape find myself anchored to the mundane, woven, by the very nature of my being, to the ordinary. I am small.

I am small.