I feel small. So very small. It’s as if every part of me, even my organs, are shrinking. As I stand at the bus stop, wind whipping against my face, rain threatening from the clouds above, I start to disappear inside my coat, the fabric becoming loose and billowing around me. Come to realise that I can’t feel my feet. Can you usually feel your feet? I try to wiggle my toes to be sure they’re still there, but it seems as if someone else has taken control, is doing it for me. A phantom hand tightens around my throat, then swiftly reaches in and squashes my vocal chords, pulverising them between their fingers. My heart, usually pounding away like a bounding rabbit, withers into a tiny pinprick of red. My lungs compress, fold in on themselves, now shrivelled pink mounds of mush. Passers by don’t give me a second glance, seemingly unaware of my undoing.
Seconds lapse, and I soon become the smallest person in the world. Only a few inches tall, barely off the ground. My organs lie next to me in a pile, expunged, and hardly noticeable – liver, heart, two kidneys, a womb, numerous feet of intestine. All newly insignificant. But not the brain. That won’t ever leave me.
The bus arrives and I struggle to make it on, my new form a stranger to me, two tiny legs dangling for a moment over the edge of the step as I pull myself up. The driver gives me a quick, noncommittal smile as I toss him my money, and reach to take my ticket from his extended arm. Nobody seems to notice anything about my size. In fact, no-one really looks at me at all. Each passenger too preoccupied with their own undoing. Hauling my body onto a seat, I take a quick scan of the faces around me. They seem to move and glitch, as though not really meant for them, not their own. Borrowed, just for the journey. My own face begins to change too, liquidating as the bus trundles on, drooping slowly down until the skin hangs limp like a hammock below me. A part of my left cheek drips quietly onto the floor, becoming another thing for an underpaid, undervalued worker to clean up. I can’t bring myself to do it.
This has happened before. There’s no use trying to make sense of it, or fix it, the parts of me that are left just won’t hold together. I’m a jigsaw missing too many pieces. Pointless, and easily discarded.
My hand has been working on crumpling my ticket into a tight ball. Something to help calm my mind. Smooth it out, crush it, then smooth it again. Make it into a paper aeroplane. One of the wings reads:
Adult. Single.
And I think something about how accurately that describes my existence. Though, I don’t feel much like an adult. If only I could smooth out my brain just as easily. Make a crack in my skull, prise it out, buff the rough, dented edges, cradle the bruises and bumps and gently massage it, whispering words of encouragement until it becomes bright and shiny and new again.
A large drop of rain splashes onto my nose from the open window, and I wonder how many times I’ve been rained on. There’s the time I was kissed leaning against a bridge in my hometown, on a walk through the park with my grandmother, on the day she died. Water streaming down my face mingling with tears as a voice I don’t recognise releases a guttural scream into my mothers back garden. Overgrown and wild, purple foxgloves towering above my head. Their petals wide, unblinking eyes, gaping at me. Sole witnesses to my vulnerability. The tie that bound me to earth severed, my place on it suddenly more uncertain than ever. The grief I felt then feels similar to this. The shrinking, the purging, all so familiar. Endless invisible strings connecting all my sites of pain.
A woman sitting across from me on the bus drifts in and out of sleep, hugging the bump blooming from her stomach. She stirs, grabs the hand of her partner, bringing it quickly to the bump. A pang of longing tugs at me. They smile in unison and look at each other, holding a tender, intimate gaze, softly kiss, and lean back into their seats with both their hands still resting on her stomach. The life growing inside containing all the same organs I left on the pavement behind me.
“ The life growing inside containing all the same organs I left on the pavement behind me” oh wow