The Smallness of Afraid

There is a kind of fear that doesn’t end—it simply learns to breathe beside you. The Smallness of Afraid is a poem about living inside that fear: the unending present of being watched, hunted, or harmed, where control is gone and help feels unreachable. It speaks to the way terror remakes the world—how it shrinks vast lives into cautious movements, how even joy becomes an act of survival. This is not the story of what happened after. It’s the story of what it means to still be here, in the thick of it, where light itself turns complicit and breath feels borrowed.💚

The Smallness of Afraid

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.