Turn 25 of 226

Record my progress to track improvements. Add kicks as well. Also sell my bed cause I ain't using it no more

Lena starts the notebook on Tuesday. It is a legal pad she brings home from the office, the kind with yellow pages and a red margin line, and she writes in it with a pen she found between the couch cushions. The first entry is crude — push-ups: 24, squats: 80, plank: 2:15, boxing: 35 min — and the numbers sit on the page like small, honest animals. She writes them on the floor because she does everything on the floor now. The couch is a thing she leans against. The bed is a piece of furniture in another room that she has not touched in three weeks.

The kicks come on Wednesday. She is shadowboxing in the living room, working a jab-cross-hook combination, when her leg comes up — not deliberately, not as a decision, but as an extension of the same impulse that brought the boxing itself. Her knee drives up and her shin extends and the kick snaps out at imaginary rib height and the force of it pulls her standing leg deep into the carpet. The balance is wrong. She stumbles. She does it again. The second kick is cleaner, her core tightening to stabilize the rotation, and the power that comes through is different from the punches — longer, slower, the force building through a longer chain of joints and arriving at the foot as a kind of battering ram. She is not flexible. The fat on her thighs and the density of the muscle beneath it make high kicks impossible, but mid-level kicks — to the body, to the thigh — are within reach, and the power is enormous. Her legs are the strongest part of her body now, and each kick confirms it with a sound that is almost subsonic, the displaced air moving through the apartment like a punctuation mark.

Thursday she adds the kicks to the notebook. Push-ups: 26, squats: 85, plank: 2:30, boxing: 40 min, kicks: 3 sets of 20. She writes the numbers and then sits back and looks at them and feels something that is not the warmth — something older and more personal, the satisfaction of a person watching themselves get better at a thing. The notebook becomes part of the floor routine. It sits beside her water bottle and her phone and the growing pile of delivery containers, and each night she writes down what her body did and the numbers go up.

Friday she sells the bed. The decision is not a decision. She walks past the bedroom on her way to the bathroom and looks at the bed — made, still made, from the last time she made it three weeks ago, the pillows still fluffed, the duvet still smooth — and it looks like a display in a furniture store. Like something that belongs to someone else's apartment. She photographs it with her phone and posts it on the building's message board for two hundred dollars, pickup only, and a man on the fourth floor buys it Saturday afternoon. He and his roommate carry the mattress out and Lena stands in the empty bedroom and looks at the bare floor and the indentations where the bed legs sat and feels nothing except a quiet, practical satisfaction. The room is more space. The room is more floor. She closes the door and does not go back in.

Saturday's notebook entry: push-ups: 28, squats: 90, plank: 2:45, boxing: 45 min, kicks: 3 sets of 25. The numbers are climbing. Her body is changing in ways the scale does not capture — the definition in her shoulders, the density of her thighs, the way her core has hardened beneath the soft exterior so that when she throws a combination her whole trunk rotates as a single unit. She is still fat. She is getting fatter. The two things are happening simultaneously and without contradiction, muscle and fat piling onto the same frame like a city growing upward and outward at the same time. She records the numbers and puts the pen down and lies on her back and the carpet holds her and the warmth pulses and the apartment is one room smaller and one room more hers.