Girl Giant
I like giants
Especially girl giants
‘Cause all girls feel too big sometimes
Regardless of their size
-Kimya Dawson, “I Like Giants”
Today, you are the size of half the classroom even with your legs tucked against your chest, even with your neck craned at an angle and your cheek pressed so tightly against the perforated tile that it’s spotted with fleshy constellations. They can smell you. They must. Your body reeks in a warm, fruity sort of way like a bog in the summer. Three deodorant sticks for just this morning, but you’re still disgusting. Your arms are pressed to your sides so hard that your whole back aches, but you press harder.
You’re wearing flip flops the size of mattresses and when you twitch your pinky toe, you knock over Lacey’s desk. Papers soar up into the fluorescent lights like emancipated doves, and with them rises the shrieking of all your classmates. Little eyes prod into you like needles pricking your crying skin. Don’t move. Don’t move. Judgement twists their faces until everyone is a conglomeration of features only. Crinkled eyebrows, cold eyes, and flat mouths await you, but the worst expressions are those of pity. That means they think they’re better than you. They see your lumbering oafness from the vantage point of mountain crests. To them, you aren’t a volcano or a hurricane, not a sleeping hillside or a glass lake. You’re a smudge on a dirt patch too ignorant of your boorish insignificance to do anything about it.
Do whales wonder if they’re too big? You don’t think so. How could they when the ocean is so windowed, wild, and wide? Whales can only be so large because the water cradles their weight. Beached whales sag, then implode, rot away into bones and plastic that never should have been there to begin with. They eat so much plastic. The big ones are especially vulnerable because they filter the ocean through their toothbrush teeth. It’s strange, when you think about it, that the biggest creatures eat the smallest things and the smallest things, the slow buildup of microplastics and toxins, can eat them from the inside out. Even the ocean isn’t safe for giants.
When you were eight, you jammed yourself in the plastic playground slide. You were going to head down, head first with your arms straight out, which was already against the rules, but then your stomach caught in the slide’s mouth. The ring pressed around your waist was like Saturn’s, which would have made you feel grand on any other day. But as the other kids stared at the bedazzled pockets on your shorts and the disappointed voice of the recess teacher echoed up the slide, you learned that vastness was its own sort of sin.
God, as if middle school wasn’t its own special sort of hell. Why do you always have to take up so much space? Just stay normal-sized. Just think normal girl-sized thoughts. Of course you try that every moment of every day until your concentration blares over the math equations on the whiteboard and the printed letters of your textbooks. The second you slip, so too goes your body until it pours out like a charging ocean colonizing every surrounding space.
The praises were plenty when you were young. Teachers would toss their heads back and say great job! Keep it up. You’re a special kid. When you got a bit older, it was thank you. Now, does anyone else want to take up space? And then they asked you to duck down so they could see other kids raise their hands. Now, you just sit in the back without being prompted.
Your best friend shrinks. Whenever she’s ridiculed, called out, or put on the spot, she becomes as small as she needs to be, then smaller still. She’s worried that like her mother, she will one day become so small that she disappears completely. She wonders whether her mother now lives among the atoms, walking across their surfaces like an astronaut on an undiscovered planet, whether she ties together electrons into makeshift sofas and watches protons and neutrons chat about daily happenings. She wonders if her mother exists anymore at all.
At what point do you disappear? Completely dissolved every loud part of yourself until nothing, not even a whisper, is left to fog the window panes? It’s easier than you think, but even now you understand how easy it is to slip between the cracks of our dimension and into the cornered waiting room of time where an infinite number of you’s are waiting, all reading the same expired magazine that none of you would’ve picked first.
The grain of the sky crackles with heat and magic and something else you’re too afraid to name. You absorb the faded road, the shimmering tree branches, and metal-stretching sound of mailboxes rusting. You take in everything always. It took you so long to realize other people don’t do this. They take in the world like walking through a 7-11: pick up a packaged brownie, set down an energy drink. Each object has its own designated place and time. But you’re always in a buzzing fog, like a snowglobe really, with everything swirling faster than your eyes can track. You’ll stick your hands out and hope to catch something brilliant. Sometimes you do. Sometimes, you are striped with papercuts. Each choice is a set of incomparable losses and wins and you will never learn.
Your grandmother is the ridge on the crest of the town. She became so large, larger still, and did everything she needed to, then she laid down and fell asleep. Blankets of moss and trees crease along her sculpted body, because it is sculpted, and curved, and bloated, dimpled, lovely. Her largeness was so much, it became impossible not to accept, but yours is right in that middle range where it’s just awkward.
On the sidewalk squirms a baby bird, its naked body punctured with sprouts of feathers. Its closed eyes are a bruised purple. In your hands, its paper skin sticks to your heartline and it’s squeaking, singing, rolling around like the heartbeat of a cat’s eye marble as your body grows around it. It doesn’t cry when you deposit it into its nest. Your head in the treetop canopies, you watch the sky move through the branches like water running over a dinner plate.
There’s something breathy about looking at the smeared line between the ocean and the sky. Their contact exists in perception only because the atmosphere continues to curve at the same rate as the earth in a never ending pursuit. And yet, the ocean and the sky aren’t separated if you consider the air you breathe, brush, and press against as part of the sky, and you do.
What is the ocean but the heavens pulled down and folded up until it’s thick enough to feel, but loose enough to be swallowed up and lost within? Whales nod and shrug into its fade and the sea carries them in cradled arms. It’s like a mother, isn’t it? You suppose we all crawled out of the ocean at one point. That we’re all made of the dust of dying stars only confirms your wishes.
The cold light of the stars freckles your cheekbones, lips, the crashing waves on the tops of your earlobes and the wishbone arc of your jawline. Here, you are. Not too big or too small. Not too much or not enough. You just are, and you always will be, and no one can take that away from you. You are all the majesty of galaxies and all the ebbing of the ocean. Your vastness is a gift and all the bottled ships can’t contain you.
Caity Scott is a neurodivergent writer from the Pacific Northwest with an MFA from Western Washington University. Their work is featured or forthcoming in Dark Matter Magazine, Snarl, Ghost City Review, The Disappointed Housewife, On the Run, and more.
