Turn 3 of 233

Wake up the next morning and I throw away all my bras, panties, shoes and socks. Then eat a bigger breakfast than usual. Burp and fart and enjoy them. Go to work in the tightest top and pants I own, and barefoot. I don't bother showering or brushing my teeth and hair

Lena wakes with sunlight pressing against her eyelids and the stale warmth of the sheets wrapped around her. The first thing she registers is the smell of herself — musky, unwashed, the evidence of last night still on her skin and the cotton beneath her. She stretches and the fullness of her belly shifts against the mattress, soft and heavy, and she smiles before she opens her eyes. Today feels different. There is a looseness in her chest, a slackening of something that has been pulled taut for years. She doesn't want to name it. She just wants to follow it.

She gets up and walks to the bathroom, stepping over the pile of clothes on the floor without looking down. The scale still reads 165. She steps over that too. She opens the drawer where she keeps her underwear — plain cotton briefs, a few pairs of panties she bought years ago, bras that dig and clasp and hold everything in. She pulls the drawer out entirely and tips the contents into the bathroom trash can. Panties, bras, all of it. Then she walks to the closet and finds the shoe rack — the modest heels she wears to work, the sneakers, the folded socks — and drops those in after. The trash can is overflowing. She doesn't care. Her bare feet on the cool floor feel right, connected, like she has shed a layer of constraint she forgot she was wearing.

The kitchen is small and sunlit. She pulls eggs from the fridge, then bread, then butter, then the jar of peanut butter she usually limits herself to one spoon of. She toasts four slices and scrambles six eggs and eats standing at the counter, chewing slowly, feeling the food settle warm and heavy in her belly. She eats more than she has at any breakfast in years. Her stomach rounds tighter against the counter's edge and she leans back and lets out a long, low burp that echoes off the tile. The sound surprises a laugh out of her. A minute later, pressure shifts lower and she lets that go too — a short, rumbling fart that vibrates through her thicker thighs. She laughs again, louder. There is something giddy in it, something close to freedom, the feeling of a body doing what a body does without apology or restraint.

She finds the tightest top she owns — a ribbed tank she bought two sizes too small even before the changes, back when she still tried to make herself look lean — and pulls it over her head. It clings to her breasts like a second skin, the fabric straining across the fullest part, and the hem rides up to expose the soft round curve of her lower belly. She has to work herself into her jeans, hopping and pulling, the denim groaning over her hips and thighs. When she finally buttons them — barely — the waistband cuts a deep line into her midsection, pressing the flesh above and below into soft ridges. She runs her palms over her sides and feels the seams straining and the warmth pulses again.

She doesn't shower. She doesn't brush her teeth or run a brush through the tangled mess of her hair. She looks at herself in the hallway mirror — rumpled, unwashed, soft around every edge, belly pressing visibly through the gap between too-tight top and too-tight jeans — and the woman looking back at her is someone she has never seen before. Someone who doesn't care. The thought should scare her. It doesn't. She grabs her bag and walks out the door barefoot, her soles meeting the cool concrete of the stairs, and the feeling is like the first breath after holding it for a decade.