Turn 3 of 21
eat more than usual and like a slob. Don't hold back burps and farts, revel in them. Unfortunately, Priya dislikes you, and this invitation is a trap. You realize this and decline. After work, you go to a bar and get sloshed. Your clothes are barely staying on by the time you get home. Strip naked than go to sleep, still burping and farting.
Lena types the reply before she even finishes chewing the last cracker. Can't today, sorry. Maybe another time. She watches the message send, watches the little checkmark appear, and feels nothing but relief. Something about Priya's invitation had a shape to it — too friendly, too sudden, too careful. Lena has worked in offices long enough to know what a setup looks like when it walks in wearing a smile. The heart emoji doesn't fool her.
She eats through the morning instead. A second bowl of cereal becomes a third, then toast with too much butter, then a banana she barely tastes. She eats at the kitchen counter standing up, and she eats without arranging herself the way she usually does — no careful napkin, no small bites, no pretending she isn't hungry. When a belch rises after the cereal she lets it go, loud and unconcerned, and the sound of it in her quiet apartment makes her laugh. Her belly is tight and round under the straining blouse and she rests both hands on it and feels the warmth there, the fullness, and thinks: yes. More of this.
By noon she has undone the top button of the skirt entirely. The zipper is holding on by a thread of fabric and a prayer. She works from her laptop on the couch, and every time she shifts she feels the seams protest, feels the blouse gape wider between the buttons, feels her body pushing against the architecture of clothes that were not built for what she is becoming. She belches again between emails, long and low, and doesn't cover her mouth. No one is watching. No one is here to judge. The freedom of it is dizzying.
The afternoon passes in a haze of work and snacking. She finishes a bag of chips without noticing. A soda, then another. Gas builds in her stomach and she lets it go without ceremony — a sharp burp between bites, a low rumble of a fart against the couch cushion that would have mortified her a week ago. Now it just feels like her body doing what bodies do, unbothered and unrestrained, and the warm voice in the back of her mind hums approval. This is comfort, it says. This is what you wanted.
After work she walks to the bar on the corner — the one she's been to a dozen times, where the bartender doesn't card her anymore. The skirt is holding together by friction and willpower. She sits on a stool and orders a whiskey, then another, then a beer to chase them, and the alcohol lands warm on top of all that food and turns the warmth in her belly to something looser and brighter. She eats the basket of fries the bartender sets out without asking. She belches into the back of her hand and then stops bothering with the hand. Two men at the end of the bar glance over and she doesn't care. She doesn't care the way she used to care, the constant careful management of how she looked and sounded and took up space. She is taking up space now and it feels like the most natural thing she's ever done.
She walks home slow, the night air cool against the sliver of belly showing through the ruined blouse. The skirt's zipper gave up three blocks ago and she's holding the waistband closed with one hand, not out of shame but practicality. The cardigan is gone — she left it on the barstool and didn't go back. In the apartment she stands in the bathroom doorway and strips with the lights on, peeling each destroyed garment off like a shed skin. The blouse buttons pop as she pulls. The skirt falls to the floor in pieces. She stands naked in the hallway, fuller and softer than she has ever been, her belly round and warm and her thighs pressing together, and a long belch rolls out of her that echoes off the tile. She laughs, stumbles to bed, and sleeps heavy and dreamless with one hand resting on the warm curve of her stomach.