Someone left an answer beneath Bellgrave’s Monday bell.
@Kathryn Olsen wrote:
“I become smaller around people who make me feel like being too much is something I should apologize for.”
I copied her words into the Black Ledger.
The ink shrank.
Letters curled inward until they nearly disappeared.
The Ledger gave me an address.
When I arrived, Kathryn was in a room full of people who never asked her to leave.
They had found a cleaner method.
They simply made more of her inconvenient.
Every time she laughed too loudly, the ceiling lowered.
Every time she spoke with conviction, the walls leaned in.
Every time she showed anger, excitement, hurt, or need, the room tightened.
By the time I found her, she was barely half her proper size.
Her voice had gone small first.
Then her opinions.
Then her appetite.
Then the strange bright edges that made her recognizable to herself.
One woman smiled over a teacup.
“She is more peaceful this way.”
“No. She is easier to ignore.”
Kathryn sat in a tiny chair apologizing for things no one should have to apologize for.
Sorry for interrupting.
Sorry for crying.
Sorry for needing more.
Sorry for taking up space she had not actually taken.
I opened the Ledger.
“Who taught you that ‘too much’ was a crime?”
She named them.
A parent.
A partner.
A friend who only liked her in edited portions.
With every name, another apology crawled from her mouth as a ribbon and wrapped around her wrists.
I rang the bell.
The ribbons became visible.
SORRY I ASKED.
SORRY I FELT THAT.
SORRY I NEEDED MORE.
The room went quiet.
I tore a page from the Ledger.
Across it was written:
YOU ARE EASIER TO LOVE WHEN YOU ARE LESS.
There it was.
Not concern.
Not maturity.
A demand for reduction dressed in manners.
Kathryn stared at the page.
“I thought becoming smaller meant I was getting better.”
“That is because they benefited from your disappearance.”
The floor cracked.
Beneath her tiny chair was a pedestal made from swallowed reactions.
Everything she had wanted to say but filed down into politeness.
I kicked the chair over.
“Stand up.”
She did.
The room immediately pressed inward.
So she stopped apologizing.
The first “no” made her taller.
The second straightened her spine.
The third split the ceiling.
Soon the walls were the ones scrambling for room.
She grew until she was exactly the size she had always been before other people mistook her fullness for a flaw.
One man covered his face.
“She is too much.”
Kathryn looked at him.
“Correct.”
The house could not survive that answer.
Every doorway widened.
Every window flew open.
The apology ribbons snapped from her wrists.
At Bellgrave’s gate, I wrote beneath her name:
“You were never too much.
You were surrounded by people whose capacity was too small for anything unedited.
Do not confuse their limits with your excess.
Anyone who requires your reduction to remain comfortable is not asking for peace.
They are asking for your disappearance.”
Kathryn crossed the threshold at her full height.
Good.
I have no use for people arriving at Bellgrave folded in half.
