Bargaining

What if I could be less? What if I could take your assertion that I was “too much” and turn it inside out.

Show you just how small I could be. How little space I could take up, just to be held in your hand.

I could fall asleep with my hands clutched to my chest instead of twisted in your hair if it meant you wouldn’t feel smothered by the magnitude of me.

What if I said I would rather never smile again than to drown you out with the booming laughter I could have sworn you said you loved?

What if I could mute the parts of me that scare you? Would that make you stay?

If every time something didn’t sit right, I bit my tongue instead of succumbing to the vulnerability you said you admired most.

Would you stay if I suffocated my ‘I miss you’s and only loved you when you wanted to be loved?

What if I threw away the things I hold that you once said made me magnificent?

That was the word you used.

Magnificent.

Could I trade them for an explanation for why you walked away?

I could stop tracing the outline of your lips with my fingertips, or kissing the stretch marks on your shoulders when I wake in the middle of the night just for a reason why.

Why you chose to stop telling me goodnight when you used to say you couldn’t find words big enough to describe what it was like waking up to me.

Why turning your back on me seems to come as easily to you as falling into you did to me.

But to make myself small enough to be held in your hands would mean never again holding yours over the table at breakfast.

It would mean never again asking about your mother, brushing my lips against your knuckles, or counting the calluses on your palms.

Never again falling asleep on your tattoos, looking at pictures of you from the years before I knew your name, or asking how your heart feels at the end of a long day.

If I can’t have those pieces of you what would be the point of being held by you at all?

If I decided to be less.

If I took your assertion that I was “too much” and turned it inside out.

If I showed you just how small I could be. How little space I could take up, just to be held in your hand.

All we’d gain was the certainty that your hands were never meant to hold me at all.