Turn 16 of 228
Reflect on what new job means. Conclude its a confirmation you are doing everything right. Text Diane to thank her. Afterwards, light another another joint and relax on the floor. Be so relaxed I piss on the floor. Skip forward to Monday, I am even fatter, 245 pounds, even more disgusting and hairy. Arrive to work high and drunk. Lock office door and strip naked. Perform even better than before.
Lena lies on the couch, naked and sticky, staring at the ceiling while the last traces of vodka warmth move through her blood. She thinks about the office. A door that locks. A space where nobody can see her unless she chooses. She thinks about Diane arranging it — the email-only client contact, the private room, the quiet admission that she sees what's happening and is working around it instead of against it. The thought settles into Lena's belly like food: warm, heavy, satisfying. Diane didn't write her up. Diane promoted her. Diane looked at the bikini and the bare feet and the crumbs and the farts and decided that the smartest thing to do was give Lena a room where she could keep being exactly this. Which means this is right. All of it. The eating and the gaining and the mess and the smell and the shamelessness — it's not a problem to solve, it's a way of being, and the universe just confirmed it with a job title and a door that locks.
She picks up the phone and types: *Thank you. Not just for the promotion. For seeing me.* She stares at the words for a moment, then adds: *I won't let you down.* She hits send and sets the phone on her belly and feels it rise and fall with her breath. Diane's reply comes in under a minute: *I know you won't. See you Monday.* Lena reads it twice and feels something tight and complicated in her chest release.
She slides off the couch onto the floor, the impact soft and heavy, her body spreading across the cool hardwood. She lights the last joint and pulls the smoke deep and lets her muscles go slack one by one — her shoulders, her back, her thighs, her belly. The smoke curls out of her mouth in slow streams. The apartment is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic. She feels her body sinking into the floor, heavy and warm and completely at ease, and the relaxation is so total, so deep, that when the pressure builds in her bladder she doesn't even consider getting up. She lets go. The warmth spreads beneath her, pooling against her hips and the small of her back, soaking into the wood, and she sighs and the joint glows between her fingers and she doesn't move. The voice is silent. Nothing needs to be said. She's comfortable.
She sleeps on the wet floor and wakes Saturday and eats and sleeps and eats again and the weekend passes in a haze of food and mess and growth. By Monday morning her body has changed again — wider, softer, heavier in ways she can feel before she opens her eyes. Her thighs press together from hip to knee with a thick, soft resistance. Her belly rests on the mattress when she lies flat, a warm, heavy weight that rises and falls with her breath. Her breasts have spread wider across her chest, fuller and heavier, and when she stands they hang forward, pulling at her shoulders. She steps on the scale and the number stares up at her: 245. She takes a photo.
She hasn't showered since Thursday. Her skin is slick with old sweat and grease and the faint dried residue of urine from the floor. Her legs and underarms are covered in dark, coarse stubble that's been growing for days. Her teeth are fuzzy. Her hair is matted. She smells like a body that's been eating and drinking and sweating and pissing for seventy-two hours without interruption, and the smell fills the apartment like a second atmosphere. She doesn't brush her teeth. She doesn't wipe. She finds the string bikini — the only thing left that remotely qualifies as clothing — and pulls it on. The strings dig into her wider hips and the triangles barely cover her nipples and the bottoms are a thin strip that disappears entirely between her cheeks. She walks out barefoot, still drunk from the night before, still high from the joint she smoked at 6 AM, and takes the bus to work.
The new office is on the third floor, at the end of the hallway, away from the open floor plan. Lena finds it by the nameplate: L. PARK — LEAD ANALYST. She unlocks the door, steps inside, and closes it behind her. The room is small — a desk, a chair, a window overlooking the parking lot. She locks the door. She pulls off the bikini and drops it on the floor and stands naked in her office, 245 pounds of soft, unwashed, hair-covered flesh, and feels the air on her skin. Then she sits down — the chair groans — and logs in. She works through the morning with a focus that cuts through the haze of alcohol and weed, drafting two client reports, reviewing a data architecture proposal, and identifying an efficiency gap in the Q3 workflow that saves an estimated fourteen hours of team labor per week. She eats a family-size bag of chips at her desk, crumbs falling onto her naked belly, and farts loudly in the empty room, and the sound bounces off the walls and comes back to her like applause. She's never been better at her job. She's never been more herself.