Jessica Hollander - When Everyone is Bigger Than Me

Jessica Hollander

When Everyone is
Bigger Than Me

I sit on a plastic seat when everyone is bigger than me. Those in overalls and patched dresses build cities in the sandbox, and these kids are wrong, and I say nothing. When everyone is bigger than me, only my feet touch the sand, and it is cold, and one day I will do something about the tray that holds me to this chair. Tucked between myself and the tray, a doll with blonde hair needs protection. She has no name. This girl with stiff limbs, with half-moon eyes, with coarse dress: replacement to the one turned ragged and streaked and lowered into a bag, which was tied, which suffocated my first, my best.

My heart is cold, but I tend to the doll when everyone is bigger than me. Her twistable arms, her rippable dress, her light hair primed for grime. Those bigger than me carve rivers and walk by my plastic seat and pinch and flick, harder, harder: endless tests when everyone is bigger than me. My new girl’s a whore, they tell me. My new girl has very bright lips.

When everyone is bigger than me, I watch their cities grow. Pail-shaped buildings piled crookedly tall, with slant windows, with finger-smudged chimneys, with grass pressed into cracks--they will melt the next rain, they will glob as the ones before.

I hold my girl’s hand when everyone is bigger than me. Stick men bound by rubber bands climb houses; they lie in streets waiting for built cities to be destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed. My girl is protected. My girl is exposed. When everyone is anyone, when everyone’s wrong and suffocates this city, when I am big and out of this sandbox, when crying remains a public act for what’s taken, for what can’t be kept; for what must be lost will be lost, will be lost.