StorytellerVex

One: Do not panic. Panic uses energy you will need for other things, and besides, it doesn't help. Two: Take stock of your surroundings. What is large? What is climbable? What is soft enough to fall onto if you miscalculate? Prioritize the last category. Three: Sound travels differently now. Low sounds carry farther than you expect. High sounds will seem sharper. Your own voice will feel insufficient. It isn't. Project from the chest. You will be heard. Four: Other people will want to pick you up. Most of them mean well. It is still reasonable to have preferences about this. Express them clearly. People respond to clarity. Five: The world is more textured than you knew. Floors have history in them. Dust is a geography. The underside of a table is its own kind of ceiling, with its own kind of sky. Six: You are allowed to find this frightening. You are also allowed to find it interesting. These are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the most useful response is usually both at once. Seven: It may not be permanent. Then again, it may. Either way, right now, this is the situation, and the situation is workable. Eight: Eat something. Drink water. Rest when you need to. Nine: You are not less yourself because you take up less space. This feels obvious to say. Say it anyway, as often as necessary. Ten: There is no ten. That's enough for now. Start with these and see what you need next.

She measured herself every morning. It had started as a joke, one of those things you do once and then can't stop doing. A pencil mark on the bathroom door, a number in the notes app, a habit that calcified over three months into something she couldn't begin the day without. On Tuesday the tape measure ran out. It was a standard one, the kind that comes in a kitchen junk drawer — ten feet, optimistically labeled. She stood with her back to the wall, the end of the tape at her heel, and stretched it overhead. It reached her collarbone. She stood there for a while looking at it. The coffee was still on. She could smell it from here. The morning was still happening, as mornings do, regardless of what you are doing in your bathroom with a tape measure. She folded it up and put it away. Some information, she had decided, you don't need to have precisely. She got dressed. She drank her coffee standing up — she'd stopped fitting in chairs two weeks ago, a fact she had not told anyone because she wasn't sure what genre of conversation that would start. Her upstairs neighbor knocked on the ceiling. Their floor. "Sorry," she said, and ducked slightly on the way out the front door. It was a normal morning. She had decided this as well. Mostly, she could make it stick.