When I was a little girl all I wanted was to feel small. I loved to curl up into a ball on my dad’s lap and believe I was invisible. I loved tight spaces, I liked hiding in my parents closet during, my knees pressed to my chest, my body as tiny as I could make it. I liked to layer blankets on top of me in the winter and pull them tight, tight, tight around my body. I used to daydream about being a tiny woman. If I was a tiny woman I would sprint. I would run over pebbles and through blades of grass and live in between the roots of a tree. I would avoid the feet of the beasts which trampled above me, I would stand on a doorknob and jump from book to book on my shelf. I wanted to be a tiny, tiny little thing. I wanted to disappear into a little warm ball. I loved the stars the most, I loved space, I loved planets. I loved how huge it all was, how giant, how mighty. I wanted to be an astronomer, before I realised that meant science and study and mathematics. I wanted to gaze, I wanted to stare through a telescope at these magnificent masses of gas and matter. I loved the idea that beyond me, beyond my body, there were so many infinite things beyond my comprehension. There was so much largeness in the universe, there was so much expanse, and I was tiny. I was small, I was unknowable to the stars, the sun, the planets, the asteroids. But I got to know them. I realised that it didn’t matter. I cried over giving a speech to my class in year 4. I was terrified. But I didn’t matter, I was a mass of particles that had existed for millions of years, the ground I stood upon had existed for longer than I could count, my words were nothing, my palm cards were nothing, it was all nothing. All that was real was Venus and Jupiter, the sun, the stars that were so much bigger than the sun they made the sun seem inconsequential, barely there. I was simply an amalgamation of everything that existed before me. And I loved it. I still love it, I love that it all falls away, none of it is real and yet all of it is. It is all so unimportant yet it is all we have. I was a tiny little cosmic miracle whose planet would one day be engulfed by the sun and any record of us would be gone. Yet we would burn and burn and burn forever in the gases of the sun, we would change, our particles would be used to fuel a fire. And at some point, when the human measurements of time had ceased to exist and it was all stretching out into nothing, the sun would be engulfed by a larger star, or sucked into a black hole, or perhaps disappear in some way I wouldn’t understand, and we would change again. Would my particles still exist? I didn’t know. But it was beautiful, it was the most beautiful thing in the world to me. To learn that I was tiny, I was a little tiny thing that didn’t matter. And yet I could be held, I could be warm, I could dream, I could be covered. It is the most beautiful thing in the world to be a tiny, little cosmic miracle of complete cosmic insignificance.
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