Apparently, I'm Not Into Tiny Women Anymore

There was a time when I thought the world was built for them. Or maybe they built the world for me, just by existing, just by glancing in my direction and allowing me to orbit. The tiny ones. The ones who are so small you wonder how their bones hold together when they walk, how they reach things on high shelves, how they lift a suitcase or carry their own weight up a flight of stairs. They always did, though. In some ways, they were the strongest people I knew. But I think I believed that because they looked like they needed me, and I liked being needed. Or at least, I liked feeling like I had something they wanted, even if I didn’t always know what it was.

They were always brunettes, or close enough. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, with that permanent glint of knowing just a little bit more about the world than they were letting on. Like Rachel in Blade Runner, stepping into the office, wrapped in a silhouette of precision and polish. Soft around the edges but steel inside. The tragic ones. Or at least, the ones who carried tragedy in them, tucked behind their enormous eyes. Sadness like a language only they spoke fluently, but they let me translate where I could. It was easy to fold myself into that sadness, to take it on as my own. Their grief became the reason I stayed, their melancholy the justification for my devotion. I mistook it for love because it felt noble to do so, and because it felt easier than dealing with whatever my own sadness was trying to say.

And they loved me, in their way. That was the magic of it. That someone so delicate and self-contained could turn their attention toward me and let me be part of their story. I used to think that meant something, that it made me significant by association. That if someone so impossibly small, impossibly strong, impossibly distant let me in, I must have been special. And when they left—because they always left, or maybe I just faded out of their lives the way you forget to water a plant until one day it’s just gone—I thought it was because I wasn’t enough. I still think that sometimes, even when I know better.

But lately, something isn’t clicking. The old spell is wearing thin. The sadness in their eyes doesn’t pull me in the way it used to. The slightness of their bodies doesn’t make me want to lift and carry and offer them the world. They are still beautiful, still breathtaking, still exactly what they were. But I am not. I don’t want to be the translator of their sorrow anymore. I don’t want to shrink myself to fit inside their worlds. I don’t want to be needed like that. I don’t know what changed. But it’s not working anymore.

Apparently, I'm not into tiny women anymore.