Turn 14 of 28
pour another drink and explore the site to see what others post
Lena reaches for the wine bottle on the floor beside the couch and pours a generous glass, the red liquid catching the light from the lamp on the side table. She takes a long sip and sets the glass on her belly, feeling the cool base of it against her warm skin, and turns the laptop toward her. The screen glows in the dim apartment and she scrolls past her own photo — already posted, already live — and into the feed of the site.
The posts come in a slow, steady stream of bodies in transformation. Women stretched across couches and beds, bellies round and taut, captions detailing weekly gains and calorie counts and goal weights. Men whose midsections have softened and spread over months of deliberate eating, posing in underwear that no longer fits. Some posts are clinical — progress photos shot against the same wall, the same angle, annotated with weights and measurements. Others are raw and unposed, shot on phones in messy bedrooms, the subjects naked and unsmiling and enormous. Lena scrolls slowly, her wine glass balanced on her belly, and feels the warmth pulse as she takes in the sheer variety of bodies all moving in the same direction as hers. She is not alone in this. She never was.
A post near the bottom of the feed catches her eye — a woman with a body bigger than Lena's, sitting on a bed surrounded by food containers, her belly resting on the mattress between her spread thighs, her caption simple: "day 94. still going. don't want to stop." The comments beneath it are a cascade of encouragement and admiration, users with names like gainer4life and soft belly and grow4me offering praise and requesting more. Lena reads through them slowly, sipping her wine, and feels something shift inside her — not the wish this time, but something more personal. The idea that there are people who would look at her body and want to see more of it, not despite what she's become but because of it.
She finishes her glass and pours another, the wine warming her, loosening something. She finds a thread of posts tagged "no hygiene" and clicks through — bodies unwashed, hair unshaved, the captions unapologetic and the comments hungry. One user has posted a series documenting three weeks without showering, the progression of body odor and visible grime treated as a feature rather than a flaw, and the responses are overwhelmingly positive. Lena reads them with a slow, spreading recognition. She scrolls back to her own post and sees that it has already accumulated a handful of views. No comments yet, but the view count climbs — seven, then twelve, then eighteen — and each number sends a small thrill through her that has nothing to do with the wine.
She sets the laptop on the couch beside her and reaches for her phone, opening the delivery app. She orders a pizza, a tray of lasagna, garlic knots, and two more bottles of red wine. Then she picks the laptop back up and starts typing a second post — a longer message this time, describing the wish, the week of naked eating, the burping and farting, the deliberate lack of hygiene, the way it all feels. She writes it plainly, without shame, the way she told Priya but without the need for permission. She posts it, takes another long drink of wine, and leans back on the couch with her belly rising and falling with each breath, waiting for the responses to come.