Small by Kelsey Coletta

       Gagan Moorthy CC




Small


People will like you if you're small. You’ll be happy. You’ll be better. You need to be small. 
You're young when it finds you, when you first hear those words and so you can barely comprehend what small really means. You'll never know why or how it found you. Perhaps it was loneliness, perhaps it was confusion. Perhaps your mere existence cried out to the universe that you were longing and lost and vulnerable. Soon the hissing in your ear only ceases if you agree on the goal you never chose. Whatever small is, that’s what you’ll be. No one else can hear the hissing so no one else can understand that this has nothing to do with the people in magazines. Small is not a look or a size because small is a more acceptable word for dead. 
But the voice will never say this. In the beginning words like trust and control are sprinkled into sentences like sprinkles onto sundaes you're no longer allowed to eat. Just trust me, an empty promise slithering through the air, nestling in your ear, hissed by a voice heard by no one but you. You hear it over and over and over until the word trust has no meaning no matter how you flip it or spin it around in your starved little mind. Nothing makes sense anymore because the voice eradicates meaning. Control is key, the only way to get small, yet control is impossible from the moment you sell your soul to a devil you couldn't have known existed.
The hunger keeps you up at night and you toss and turn, body wrapped tightly in the sheets you hope will shield you from your madness. You think back to childhood and the way you tucked your feet into bed so the monster that lay lurking beneath you had nothing to latch onto. No way to grab you and pull you into the darkness but by now you realize that you created that darkness. You are the monster under your bed.
The mirror stings and your reflection burns. You can only really see the emptiness in your eyes when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the water just under your chin. You pray to a porcelain god you never believed in, palms on the floor, tiles cool enough to remind you you’re alive. You confess your sins and long for forgiveness but no matter how empty you make yourself, you're never absolved of your wrongs. 
It shifts at some point, and then the true goal becomes clear. It was never about trust or control or being better. You can never be good enough so why bother? You know what's really small, the voice will start to whisper. 
Dust. 
Earth. 
Bits of the ground that are swept away in the wind. 
Small and light and free.


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​Kelsey Coletta is a Rhode Island based licensed clinical therapist. She is a graduate of both Rhode Island College and Simmons University. She lives in Johnston, RI with her husband and their two dogs and two cats. Her work has appeared in You Might Need to Hear This, Hawai'i Pacific Review and TPT Magazine.