Turn 11 of 226

Tell Diane the truth — I feel amazing and I don't know why. She is even more confused

Lena feels the conversation pulling her toward a cliff edge — not because she is afraid of falling, but because she genuinely cannot tell where the cliff is. The truth has been simple so far. She feels good. She does not know why. But Diane is looking at her with the specific intensity of a woman who is about to ask a question that will make the simplicity collapse, and Lena can feel it coming the way you feel weather change.

"I spent the day exploring how my body has changed," Lena says again, because repetition feels safer than new territory. She shifts her weight and the chair groans beneath her.

"All of it. Every part. I know it sounds strange. I know I look —" She gestures down at herself, the belly hanging free, the crop top dark with old sweat, the bare feet with their dirty soles. "I know. But I have never felt more comfortable in my own skin. I can't explain it. I've spent my whole life feeling wrong in my body and now I don't, and I don't know why, and I don't know how to make that sound normal because it isn't normal. It's just true."

Diane uncrosses her arms. She crosses them again. Her reading glasses have slipped down her nose and she pushes them up with one finger, a gesture so habitual it is almost invisible, and the smallness of it — the normalcy — sits strangely against the strangeness of everything else in the room.

"Lena, when you say you've changed —" She pauses. "Physically? You mean you've gained weight? Is that what this is?"

The question lands in Lena's stomach like food. She can feel it settle, warm and heavy, and the warmth pulses in response, pleased. Diane has named the thing. Not all of it — not the strength, not the arousal, not the wish — but the visible part, the part that is straining the crop top and hanging over the waistband. Lena looks down at her own belly, round and flushed and resting against the desk, and she feels a surge of something that is too bright to be embarrassment. Pride, maybe. Or recognition.

"Yes," Lena says. "Among other things. But yes. And I like it, Diane. I like how I look. I like how I feel. I spent years hating every pound and now I can't get enough of it. I know that doesn't make sense. I know you're standing there trying to figure out if I've lost my mind. But I'm sitting here doing the best work I've done in months and I feel incredible and I just — I wanted you to know that."

Diane stares at her. The fluorescent light buzzes. The food containers on the desk throw a faint smell of old grease into the air, mixing with the deeper smell of Lena's unwashed skin, and the office feels very small. Diane's mouth opens. Closes. She looks at the door behind her, closed and shut, and then back at Lena, and her expression has shifted into something that Lena has never seen on a coworker's face before — not concern, not judgment, but the particular stillness of a person who has been handed a problem that has no clean solution. The work is excellent. The woman is not. Both facts sit in the room like furniture, and Diane is standing between them unable to sit down.