Turn 22 of 233

Make breakfast in the kitchen. Then weigh myself. Feel proud for weighing 200 pounds of fat and muscle. Enjoy my fat, strong, hairy, tanned, sweaty, disgusting body

The kitchen smells like last night's rotisserie chicken and the faint sour tang of the beer she didn't finish. Lena stands naked at the stove, bare feet spread wide on the gritty tile, cracking eggs into a pan with one hand. Eight eggs. A handful of bacon strips laid in the second pan, the fat popping and spitting. She eats a piece of cold chicken while she cooks, pulling the meat off the bone with her teeth, grease running down her chin. The bacon curls and crisps and she lays it on a paper towel and eats two strips standing over the stove, the salt and smoke sharp on her tongue. She scrambles the eggs with cheese and salsa, scoops them onto a plate with the rest of the bacon and three slices of toast thick with butter, and carries everything to the counter where she eats standing, the way she always eats now — belly pressed against the counter edge, the full round weight of it resting on the laminate, her body settled into the posture of a person who feeds herself without apology.

She eats all of it. The eggs are gone, the bacon is gone, the toast is gone, and she drains a glass of whole milk and lets out a belch so deep and resonant it vibrates the empty plate on the counter. She farts — long, low, rumbling — and doesn't move. Her belly is full and round, pushing outward, the skin warm and taut, and she runs her hand across it and feels the layers: the warmth of the food just beneath the surface, the soft fat yielding under her fingers, the firm muscle beneath that, the deep heat of her own body. She looks down at herself in the gray morning light and takes in the whole of what she is.

The bathroom scale is in the closet where she threw it weeks ago, behind a box of old shoes she'll never wear again. She digs it out and sets it on the bathroom floor and steps on it, her bare callused feet settling on the cold glass surface, her belly hanging heavy and full above. The numbers settle. Two hundred. Two hundred pounds. She stares at the number and waits for the old feeling — the panic, the shame, the urgent need to fix it — and it doesn't come. What comes instead is a warmth that starts in her chest and spreads outward through every soft, heavy, sun-darkened inch of her. Two hundred pounds of fat and muscle and sweat and hunger and strength. Two hundred pounds of the body she built by working and eating and refusing to be anything other than what she is.

She steps off the scale and stands in front of the full-length mirror. The tan is deeper in the morning light than it was yesterday — a rich golden brown across her shoulders and the tops of her breasts and her forearms and shins, the pale skin beneath her belly and the undersides of her arms marking where the sun doesn't reach, the contrast sharp and clear. Her body hair is thick and dark — the coarse growth on her calves and thighs, the line below her navel, the full patch beneath her arms, the fine dark hair on her forearms bleached lighter by the sun. Her feet are callused and black with ground-in dirt, the soles thick and leathery. Her hair is tangled and unwashed, falling in thick ropes past her shoulders. She smells like sweat and old food and the deep musk of a body that hasn't been washed in days, and the smell is part of her now, the way the tan is part of her, the way the calluses are part of her.

She is fat. She is strong. She is hairy and tanned and sweaty and disgusting and two hundred pounds and the body in the mirror is the most comfortable thing she has ever owned. She flexes — arms out, chest lifted, belly forward — and the muscle rises beneath the softness like something geological, the deep strength pressing up through layers of fat, and she feels it all at once: the fullness of her belly, the heaviness of her breasts, the solid mass of her thighs, the calloused strength of her feet, the heat of her own unwashed skin. She doesn't want to shower. She doesn't want to shave. She doesn't want to be cleaner or smaller or quieter or less. She is two hundred pounds of exactly what she is and the pride that fills her is so large and simple it feels like the ground she's standing on.