Turn 23 of 226

Check the scale Saturday morning and see what the week has done. I'm at 152 now. The weekend passes the same as last weekend. On Monday at work, the crop top finally rips completely off. I shrug and continue with my excellent work and with my habits

Saturday morning, and the scale says 152. Seven pounds in a week. Lena stands on it with both bare feet and watches the number settle and holds it there, the way a person holds a note they want to hear the end of. Twenty-two pounds total. She looks down at her body and the body looking back is something she does not recognize and recognizes completely — the belly that hangs lower and rounder, the breasts that have outgrown every dimension of the crop top, the thighs that press together from hip to knee with a density that is half fat and half muscle and wholly, impossibly hers. The warmth surges and she feels the word she always feels. More.

The weekend is a copy of a copy. Lena strips at the door and does not dress again until Monday. She orders food — three meals Saturday, three meals Sunday, the delivery drivers no longer knocking, just leaving bags at her door as if they have been briefed. She exercises harder than last weekend because last weekend's workout is this weekend's warm-up. Twenty-two push-ups now. Squats until her legs shake and then five more. The plank hold reaches two minutes. Her body responds to each demand with a readiness that feels preordained, the muscle piling on beneath the fat like something architectural, and the soreness that follows is the kind that means growth and not damage. She eats on the floor. She touches herself on the floor. She sleeps on the floor. The carpet has a permanent impression of her body now, a shallow depression in the pile that is wider than it was last weekend. The apartment smells like a place where someone lives fully and without restraint, and Lena does not open a window.

Monday morning she pulls the crop top over her head and the fabric catches on her breasts and she tugs and hears it before she feels it — a short, decisive sound, a stitch surrendering, and then a longer one, and then the whole garment separates along the side seam and comes apart in her hands like something that was held together by habit and nothing else. She stands in the bathroom holding two pieces of cotton and looking at them with the expression of a person who has been expecting a letter and has finally received it. The shorts are still on. They are barely on — the waistband cutting into her hips, the fabric stretched thin across her ass, the legs riding up until they have become something more like briefs than shorts — but they are on. The crop top is not. It is finished.

She puts on a sports bra. It is the only thing left in the back of her closet, a relic from a fitness phase two years ago, and it fits the way the crop top fit three weeks ago — tight, compressing, functional. Her belly is fully bare beneath it, her breasts compressed but visibly overflowing the cups, and the combination of sports bra and athletic shorts on a six-six body that weighs 152 pounds and has not showered in six days is not an outfit. It is a fact. She walks to work barefoot in it.

The office receives her the way the ocean receives a river — with a kind of ambient resistance that changes nothing. She sits down and the chair groans and she opens the operational audit and begins. The work is waiting for her the way the floor is waiting for her, the way the warmth is waiting in her belly, and she enters it with the same totality she enters everything now. By ten o'clock she has finished the audit revisions and started on the vendor analysis nobody asked for. By noon she has eaten two breakfast burritos and a large iced coffee at her desk and burped so loudly that someone in the hallway paused. She does not look up. The door is open. The bra is holding. Her belly sits bare and round between the bottom of the bra and the top of the shorts, and her skin is dark with six days of not washing, and she is producing work that would make Marcus weep with professional gratitude if he could see past the woman producing it.

At two o'clock she farts so hard the chair vibrates. She does not break stride on the vendor spreadsheet.