Small

CONTENT WARNING: mentions of eating disorders and body image

I am too small for my body.

Every morning I use my ribs as ladder rungs, drag open my curtain eyelids, and look around

careful not to let my sight sit anywhere, as nothing ever quite feels comfortable.

Getting dressed is like trying to spell calendar or separate on Microsoft word. Everything I try on immediately has a serrated edge red line, telling me something doesn’t look right.

God won’t let me be shorter but she cannot stop me from being smaller.

Want to subtract the space I take up like a math problem.

I hope that by spreading myself thin, a cracked slab of clay rolled out one too many times,  it will show people

Show them that I know that I don’t deserve the space I was given to take up.

At school my lunch is a pack of stale juicy fruits.

I suck on each one for five minutes.

One juicy fruit is twelve calories, and so I quickly calculate that a twenty five minute lunch period equals 65 jumping jacks.

After a year of these lunches I don’t recognize myself and I am glad.

I am not bursting out of my body,

My body is bursting out of me.

Every clumsy trip over my wobbly deer legs is an earthquake in a library,

Your oak tree is my toothpick,

Your car door, my limbo bar (and not in the fun, party kind of way)

I am a giant in a world of Jacks,

and there is no beanstalk to climb up and hide in.

You’re tall and blonde,

They say,

You could be really pretty,

Yeah you could totally be a model...

If you got your braces off

If you lost some weight

If your hair was lighter

If your acne cleared up

If your nose was smaller.

Um, maybe just stick to basketball.

Oh you don’t play basketball?

Shame.

I’ve always been tall, and I’ve never been called beautiful.

I’ve never been an object of affection.

Don’t tell me you wouldn’t correlate the two.

I wonder if I’ll ever find someone strong enough to hold my giant’s heart in their hands.

I tell by body to stop defying gravity.

My bones are silly putty that god can’t seem to put down,

I’ve had growing pains for so long, I’m not sure what a normal human feels like.

They say in the womb you start out smaller than a period on a paper.

I wonder if I was ever small.

by LILY LAWRENCE