Small blue thing

He said I was the sun and moon. He said I shone. He said I was the world. Unchartered territory, deep oceans. I contained poles and mountains, languages and valleys he would explore. I was a spinning globe in his hands. 

Stick a pin in me and decide where you want to go. 

The thing about me is I have no sharp edges. I’ve no ’side’ to me, he said, and he was right. The corners had been rounded off me. I had learned to be agreeable; I was a smiling face, a birthday cake, the unchipped rim of a china cup. Perfect.

I could never be spiky or hurtful, I was lost in my own unending smoothness. I would slip onto his finger, his waist, a wedding ring, a belt. I would hold him in my hollow self and he would be safe.

I didn’t notice my own descent from globe to glass marble. Didn’t feel myself shrinking.

Along the way I became a football, kicked and volleyed and caught for sport. If enough force was applied, I bounced. When I deflated I was blown up again, allowed to feel strong, in time for the next game.

I became a hole, an open well, a round red mouth in a silent scream. A surprised ‘O’. A zero.

Now I am a tiny glass sphere, blue as my eye, small enough to be kept in his pocket, worried at by his fingers. I could be rolled away, down a ginnel, into a gutter, and nobody would see me there, glinting and glittering.

Nobody would know I used to be the whole world.

(Photo by Alin Andersen on Unsplash; title from Suzanne Vega)