The Height Dissonance Phenomenon

I’m going to love people.
 

God help me. God help me, 

I am going to love people.

.

Sometimes I think I was born into the wrong body.

Not for the reasons you may think.
 

I am small. 
short, stout, and formerly-petite. 
Through years, I have made myself wiry. Compact. 
Sturdy, strong, and powerful.
 

I have had to.
(I don’t know how else to be.)

But I am small, nonetheless.
 

I tip my head back when I want to meet your eyes.
I disappear into your arms when it’s you I’m trying to hold.

And at times, the dissonance feels so overwhelming that I can hardly believe that something, somewhere, hasn’t gone wrong.

..I was meant to be big. I think. 
 

Big enough sink into the ground and fill every crevice; a foundation, or an anchor.

Big enough to wrap my arms around everybody I know—once, twice, thrice—

and bring each of them home on my shoulders.

Big enough to stand tall like a shield. Hold steady like a pillar.

 

(I may be heavyset mastiff, curled into the body of a terrier. A roaring pipe organ, made to plink quaint, pleasant notes out through a keyboard.)

Sometimes…I think I was meant to be big enough to protect.
 

.

I walk this world, and I hear endless talk of swallowing the sun. Something about power. Something of greatness. Something. Some—
 

—I nearly died.

When I was a child, I lay with eyes closed and mouth split wide. A heart laid open, raw and wondrous.

Waiting.

When I was a child, a star splintered above my brow, spilling fractals all down my throat. 
Spidering into oblivion. 
 

My lung collapsed, or so they tell me.
With luck, care, and just the right doctor, I survived—

—Is what I’ve heard.
 

And yet, whole and healthy, I have lived this life in scattered fractals ever since, shaking and over-full—Coughing up the cosmos with a gaping heart that never closed.

How can I ever stretch to bear the heat that riots in my chest, ribcage etched in plasma-white? How can I possibly stifle a solar flare, seal shut around the burning shard at my core?
 

I do not know.

I only know

that I am

trying to

be

yours.

.


Do you understand? 
Do you?

I swell with a fragment that sears deep into the pit of my stomach, and grow bigger. 
In every way I know how. I try.
 

But as long as you stoop to meet my eye, I know you will never truly lean on me. 
My small frame, comical, trembling ever-so-slightly in an attempt to hold you up.

(And it only takes that much before you relent.)

My frustration, comical, with exclamations pitched up and paltry. 
So much deep discontent turned cute by size alone. 

(And it is not your fault.)
 

Never your fault, but please. 
I need you to know.

Every day.

I want to hold you in my arms and burn.