Turn 44 of 226

Start the next training cycle and push the high kick goal. When I am at home, I piss whenever I feel the need to. I only use the toilet for shitting. Also my work continues to improve.

The cycle begins on a Monday and Lena walks to work naked in the morning sun and the security guard does not look up and the elevator carries her to the fourth floor and the chair groans when she sits. The vendor compliance matrix has expanded — three new vendors onboarded last quarter, each with their own documentation requirements — and Lena works through the flags with a speed that surprises even her. The numbers are clean. The logic is clean. Her mind is operating in the same mode as her body: direct, efficient, uninterested in anything that is not the task. She produces two completed deliverables by Wednesday and Marcus's confirmation email arrives in four words: "Received. Looks good." She eats at her desk — five meals now, ordered in staggered deliveries, the containers stacking on the shelf beside her monitor — and the eating is not a break from work. It is concurrent with work. Her left hand holds a container of rice and curry and her right hand works the mouse and her belly sits heavy in her lap and she burps and the sound carries down the hallway and the building absorbs it.

The high kick is the obsession of this cycle. Every night after the bag work and the ground drills she stands in the center of the living room and lifts her right leg and the leg rises past the waist, past the ribs, and on day three it reaches her chest. The hold is trembling — ten seconds, then seven, then five as the height increases — and the stretch in her hamstring is a bright wire of tension that runs from the back of her knee to the base of her spine. She pushes. The left leg is two inches behind and on day five she isolates the hip mobilization work — sitting on the floor, rolling the joint in slow circles, pressing the knee open with her hand — and something shifts on day seven. The left leg jumps from chest height to chin height in a single session and the surprise nearly takes her off her feet and she catches herself against the wall and the wall is warm where her shoulder presses into it.

The toilet becomes a partition in her mind. Not a rule — she does not make rules — but a practical separation. The bladder is handled wherever the body happens to be. The living room carpet, the kitchen tile, the bathroom floor — the stream comes and goes and the warmth of it is always the same and the smell layers into the apartment's atmosphere and the atmosphere is hers. The toilet is for the other thing. She sits on it for that, the lid up, the cold porcelain against her massive thighs, and the function is performed and she stands and does not flush every time because the water sound is unnecessary and the apartment does not need to be a bathroom. It is a living space. The body lives in it.

By day ten the right leg holds at head height for thirty seconds. She stands on one leg in the center of the room — 225 pounds balanced on the left foot, the right leg extended straight out at the level of her own ear — and the hold is steady. The fat on the lifted thigh hangs slightly beneath the muscle and the muscle does not move. The image in the darkened window reflection is a woman who weighs 225 pounds and is fat and dirty and tall and is holding her leg at head height and the image is absurd and correct. She lowers the leg slowly. The control on the descent is the hardest part — the eccentric strength required to lower 225 pounds of body plus the weight of the leg itself without dropping it — and she lowers it in a four-count and the foot touches the floor without a sound.

The work delivers again. On day twelve she completes a quarterly vendor performance analysis that identifies a markup discrepancy the compliance team missed — eleven thousand dollars per quarter in overcharges from a supplier who has been inflating their reported costs for six months. She flags it, documents the audit trail, and sends it to Marcus with a recommendation for vendor renegotiation. Marcus forwards it to his director without changes. She knows this because the forward chain appears in her inbox by accident — Marcus's assistant CC'd her on the confirmation — and the director's response is a single line: "Who found this?" Marcus's reply: "Lena Park, vendor compliance." The name sits in her inbox and the name is hers and the body that did the work is naked and dirty and 225 pounds and sitting in an office chair that has been groaning under her for weeks and the work is excellent and the body is excellent and the two things are the same thing. The rest days arrive. She lies on the floor and the warmth pulses and the cycle is complete and the spiral tightens again.

She stands in the kitchen on the first rest day and drinks water from a container and the pressure builds in her bladder and she does not move. The stream comes on the kitchen tile and the warmth spreads under her bare feet and she finishes drinking and sets the container down and steps out of the puddle and walks to the living room and the transition is seamless. The body does not distinguish between spaces. Every space is the body's space. The warmth says yes and the rest day continues and the ceiling is above her and the bag is in the corner and the legal pad has twenty new entries and the ink is smudged and the pen is out and she needs a new one and the needing is fine. The needing is part of it. The body needs and the body receives and the cycle continues.