The Smallness of Afraid
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
Once, life was enormous.
It stretched across continents,
crossed oceans with ease,
filled cities and languages and sunlit mornings
with the weightless certainty of being safe.
It was vast enough to hold laughter
without calculation,
and love that reached beyond the visible.
Now, the world has collapsed to scale.
A house.
A hallway.
A single room where air trembles
under the discipline of vigilance.
The window blinks too slowly,
the phone hums like a living thing.
Even silence is crowded.
Every movement is measured—
routes rehearsed, smiles softened,
joy scheduled like a fragile appointment
between storms.
The laughter, when it comes,
arrives as a ghost of itself—
too careful, too bright,
shadowed by the knowing
that safety is a story already disproved.
Sleep offers no reprieve.
It is brief and borrowed,
a flicker between alarms,
a drowning with eyes open.
Dreams become another room
to be searched for exits.
Morning is less a beginning
than a continuation of the bare bones of surviving.
In carefully planned measures of half-joy—
because now, beneath the ever-present cloud,
there is never full-joy.
There is a constant hum behind the day,
a dark vibration just off-screen—
the awareness of being seen,
measured, imagined,
reduced to a reflection
in someone else’s obsession.
It follows like weather.
It waits like static.
It is never gone.
And still, somewhere inside the shrinking,
a memory breathes—of the before.
The unguarded hours.
The unthinking joy.
The endlessness of being unafraid.
And the memory itself feels like death
by a thousand cuts—
the ache of trying to get back there,
the knowledge that someone has torn life from me,
made this world small,
made living no life at all.
And left me standing in the hollow of it,
searching for a door
in walls that never open.
The memory keeps the body moving,
but only out of habit.
Even as the world narrows around it,
even as light itself begins to whisper—
not of rescue,
but of surrender.
Smaller now.
Smaller still.
Until even breath feels borrowed.
Because once, there was a life so large
it could not be contained.
And now, it is reduced
to a pulse in the dark—
but still, impossibly,
a pulse.
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