Smalls
by Jung Hae Chae
I’m learning that I’m small. More spirit than body, than mind. Maybe 75% spirit, 25% body-mind. More like 90/10. I breathe, I sigh, I step in and out of clothes that don’t fit no more. I read words, I write words, one damn syllable at a time. I walk. I walk through the revolving doors of this life, this one act among many, as I’m learning it to be, with my spirit elsewhere. It wishes to be elsewhere. Only 10% of the time, I’m here. Here but not here. “Come down to earth, Jung Hae. Stay a while longer!” I have to convince myself sometimes.
I love to learn. In grad school, we learned about the small sentence. A small sentence is one that contains the key to unlocking the complicated tangle of thoughts, feelings, ideas, or what other mess have you, the thousand interlocking puzzle pieces swirling in our brain-universe, and with which we try to create meaning by assembling them, more often than not, into not-small sentences. There, I just wrote one, the anti-small sentence. See how cluttered that was. The small sentence must take root in the mind field among the not-smalls, though sometimes it may do so only after the chunkier, clunkier ones have had their turn. The thing about the small sentence is that it doesn’t have to be small. Small is not the same as elemental. Is not the same as minimal. But close enough. I like small sentences. As sentences go, I prefer them small because, as I said, I am only 10% here. But that 10% is what’s most important to my survival as a species and to the integrity of what some people call art, that primordial sense-making in which I’m partaking. This, too, I have to remind myself sometimes.
Sometimes, my small daughter and I write together. I give us a prompt and we write for a small time, in silence, in opposite corners of our small living room. 90% of our lives, singly and together, we are “out there,” but when we write together, inside a small time and a small space, we are partaking, my daughter & I, in the sense-making of that 90% with the remaining 10%. This is what I tell myself, this is what I do to trick myself into staying put, here in this one act, though I don’t tell her that. She doesn’t yet know or care to know the meaning of the small sentence.
Yet, the other day, she wrote a poem called the “Smalls.” “There are so many different types of smalls,” the poem began. A small car, a small heart, a small elephant in the field. Soon, the poem zooms out to a small earth, as it contemplates what “a small amount of evil, a small amount of happiness” might mean, before it lands back down to “a small ladybug on your nose.” I almost cried hearing this small brilliance. I hope she won’t get mad when she finds out that her mother is also writing about the smalls. I swear I had the idea first or at the same time as she had hers. She will argue otherwise. We are alike in this way, as mother & daughter.
It’s true I longed for my mother when I was five, half of my daughter’s age. I remember the precise moment I came upon this small truth, though I’m certain the longing had begun much earlier. Damage precedes recognition. We were together, my mother and I, lying on a small bed laid out neatly on the dank floor, that we shared as mothers and daughters sometimes did back then. It was winter. The promise of snow and school break was nearby. It should have been cozy. Love can feel like that, cozy. She had been holding me in her arms, so I could fall asleep. That’s what mothers do sometimes, hold their small children in their arms when they can’t fall asleep. She was playing that role.
It’s true, an absence, an interior one, is sometimes felt more expansively by children than non-children, like the gravitational pull of small spatial things by the black hole. Children start out in this world as ten-percenters, as I have since become. I know this, having been a child once and a motherless adult-child for many years now. In the bed, I, too, was playing a role. Of a child who likes to be comforted by a mother who holds her in her sleep. Even then, I was already elsewhere. Though we were together, we were not together, my mother & I. Here, the & feels untrue.
Some people are small. Some are made small, programmed to be small, or tricked into being small. No amount of milk drinking will help with this problem. My grandmother stood at 4’8”. She was small in inches but not small-headed or small-hearted. Before my mother held me in her arms, my grandmother had held me first. Behind our house, there was a mountain. There was a silence inside that mountain, like the silence inside my grandmother. On Sundays, she would hold my small hands, hold them tight inside hers, like a promise, and we would walk up the mountain together, my grandmother & I, making our way through the broken branches, through rock-beds opening to creek-beds, our heels bleeding a little along the way, and the musk of wet trees thrusting heavy into our chests, like sad ghosts that had followed us from another lifetime. At the summit was a temple, where my grandmother bowed down on her knees and prayed. She prayed not to a god but into a silence, and within that silence, I too was made small, the small of my heart teaching the rest of my heart to sit with my longing.
My mother died in winter. I was twice the age of my daughter now. Snow had come days earlier, thoughtfully and beautifully, stippling the tops of trees, roofs, heads. There, in the hospital quad, as snow flakes caught my billowing hair, I too was made beautiful, if for a moment, for I knew I was being prepared, not for the promise of spring and summer and all the seasons of a charmed life ahead, but for a different kind: to be lived, slowly slowly, inside a small sentence. This too is longing. Longing is not time-bound. It isn’t small. Is hard to contain it inside a small sentence. I know this now.
When my time comes, they will find inside me the small stuff—the small of my child’s back, the small moments inside my days when I look up from doing the dishes maybe, and notice her playing. She is drenched in light, the air around her folding into a pocket of silence, the whole of the universe – hers & mine – right there. Sometimes, afternoons, a thought flits across a small river that is the sink water, then swoops across my mind, like a bird in flight. An imprint of something from another lifetime maybe, that stays with me for a brief, boundless moment. Like the moon-shaped rice cakes my grandmother & I used to make all the time when I was small.
I love to learn. In grad school, we learned about the small sentence. A small sentence is one that contains the key to unlocking the complicated tangle of thoughts, feelings, ideas, or what other mess have you, the thousand interlocking puzzle pieces swirling in our brain-universe, and with which we try to create meaning by assembling them, more often than not, into not-small sentences. There, I just wrote one, the anti-small sentence. See how cluttered that was. The small sentence must take root in the mind field among the not-smalls, though sometimes it may do so only after the chunkier, clunkier ones have had their turn. The thing about the small sentence is that it doesn’t have to be small. Small is not the same as elemental. Is not the same as minimal. But close enough. I like small sentences. As sentences go, I prefer them small because, as I said, I am only 10% here. But that 10% is what’s most important to my survival as a species and to the integrity of what some people call art, that primordial sense-making in which I’m partaking. This, too, I have to remind myself sometimes.
Sometimes, my small daughter and I write together. I give us a prompt and we write for a small time, in silence, in opposite corners of our small living room. 90% of our lives, singly and together, we are “out there,” but when we write together, inside a small time and a small space, we are partaking, my daughter & I, in the sense-making of that 90% with the remaining 10%. This is what I tell myself, this is what I do to trick myself into staying put, here in this one act, though I don’t tell her that. She doesn’t yet know or care to know the meaning of the small sentence.
Yet, the other day, she wrote a poem called the “Smalls.” “There are so many different types of smalls,” the poem began. A small car, a small heart, a small elephant in the field. Soon, the poem zooms out to a small earth, as it contemplates what “a small amount of evil, a small amount of happiness” might mean, before it lands back down to “a small ladybug on your nose.” I almost cried hearing this small brilliance. I hope she won’t get mad when she finds out that her mother is also writing about the smalls. I swear I had the idea first or at the same time as she had hers. She will argue otherwise. We are alike in this way, as mother & daughter.
It’s true I longed for my mother when I was five, half of my daughter’s age. I remember the precise moment I came upon this small truth, though I’m certain the longing had begun much earlier. Damage precedes recognition. We were together, my mother and I, lying on a small bed laid out neatly on the dank floor, that we shared as mothers and daughters sometimes did back then. It was winter. The promise of snow and school break was nearby. It should have been cozy. Love can feel like that, cozy. She had been holding me in her arms, so I could fall asleep. That’s what mothers do sometimes, hold their small children in their arms when they can’t fall asleep. She was playing that role.
It’s true, an absence, an interior one, is sometimes felt more expansively by children than non-children, like the gravitational pull of small spatial things by the black hole. Children start out in this world as ten-percenters, as I have since become. I know this, having been a child once and a motherless adult-child for many years now. In the bed, I, too, was playing a role. Of a child who likes to be comforted by a mother who holds her in her sleep. Even then, I was already elsewhere. Though we were together, we were not together, my mother & I. Here, the & feels untrue.
Some people are small. Some are made small, programmed to be small, or tricked into being small. No amount of milk drinking will help with this problem. My grandmother stood at 4’8”. She was small in inches but not small-headed or small-hearted. Before my mother held me in her arms, my grandmother had held me first. Behind our house, there was a mountain. There was a silence inside that mountain, like the silence inside my grandmother. On Sundays, she would hold my small hands, hold them tight inside hers, like a promise, and we would walk up the mountain together, my grandmother & I, making our way through the broken branches, through rock-beds opening to creek-beds, our heels bleeding a little along the way, and the musk of wet trees thrusting heavy into our chests, like sad ghosts that had followed us from another lifetime. At the summit was a temple, where my grandmother bowed down on her knees and prayed. She prayed not to a god but into a silence, and within that silence, I too was made small, the small of my heart teaching the rest of my heart to sit with my longing.
My mother died in winter. I was twice the age of my daughter now. Snow had come days earlier, thoughtfully and beautifully, stippling the tops of trees, roofs, heads. There, in the hospital quad, as snow flakes caught my billowing hair, I too was made beautiful, if for a moment, for I knew I was being prepared, not for the promise of spring and summer and all the seasons of a charmed life ahead, but for a different kind: to be lived, slowly slowly, inside a small sentence. This too is longing. Longing is not time-bound. It isn’t small. Is hard to contain it inside a small sentence. I know this now.
When my time comes, they will find inside me the small stuff—the small of my child’s back, the small moments inside my days when I look up from doing the dishes maybe, and notice her playing. She is drenched in light, the air around her folding into a pocket of silence, the whole of the universe – hers & mine – right there. Sometimes, afternoons, a thought flits across a small river that is the sink water, then swoops across my mind, like a bird in flight. An imprint of something from another lifetime maybe, that stays with me for a brief, boundless moment. Like the moon-shaped rice cakes my grandmother & I used to make all the time when I was small.