Turn 2 of 228
Find something even tighter to squeeze into. Then go outside and show off to the people, let them see!
Lena stands in front of her closet, fingers still resting on the hangers, and the thought lands like a dare. Not just tight clothes — the tightest things she owns. The pieces she kept only because throwing them out felt like admitting defeat. She pushes past the jeans she just buttoned and digs toward the very back, past a thrift-store blazer, past a skirt she hasn't touched since college, until her hand closes on a pair of grey leggings she bought a size too small on purpose two years ago, thinking the squeeze would motivate her to lose weight. It never did. She wore them once and spent the evening unbuttoning her waistband under the table at a restaurant, miserable and distracted.
She steps out of the jeans — which takes effort now, the denim clinging to the new thickness of her thighs — and pulls the leggings up. They resist. The fabric stretches thin across her calves, her knees, and then catches at her hips and refuses to move for a long, breathless moment. She hops, pulls, twists, and feels the waistband crawl up over the fullest part of her backside with a faint sound like tape peeling off a surface. When she finally gets them up, the fabric is nearly translucent across her thighs, showing the dimpled texture of her skin underneath. The waistband digs deep into the soft roll of her belly, cutting it into two distinct curves — the part above pressing outward against her ribs, the part below swelling over the elastic. She can see her own shape through the leggings like a topographic map, every new contour rendered in clingy grey.
She finds a ribbed crop top she'd forgotten about, something she bought online and never returned because returning things felt harder than shoving them in a drawer. It was snug when she bought it. Now she pulls it over her head and it catches on her chest, stretches tight across her breasts, and rides up immediately, settling somewhere above her navel with no intention of going lower. The bare expanse of her belly — round, soft, visibly fuller than it was even yesterday — sits between the hem of the top and the brutal waistband of the leggings. She turns in the mirror. The leggings make her legs look enormous and unmistakable. The crop top frames her belly like it's on display. She looks like someone who chose this on purpose.
She grabs her keys and phone and walks to the front door, and every step reminds her what she's wearing. The leggings strain at the inner seams when her thighs rub together. The crop top shifts with her breathing, riding higher, showing more. She opens the door and steps into the hallway of her building, and the air hits the exposed skin of her stomach like a cool hand. She takes the stairs instead of the elevator — slowly, feeling the fabric pull and stretch with each step — and pushes through the front door onto the sidewalk.
It's a mild evening. People walk past with grocery bags and phone calls and the distracted half-attention of city life. A man in a grey jacket glances at her midsection as she passes and looks away quickly. A woman pushing a stroller does a small double-take, eyes moving from Lena's belly to the leggings to her face, and then forward again. Nobody says anything. Nobody needs to. Lena can feel the looks landing on her like fingertips — on the tight fabric, on the exposed curve of her stomach, on the way her body moves differently now, heavier and softer and more present than it used to be. She walks three blocks without pulling anything down, without crossing her arms, without making herself smaller. The waistband of the leggings aches against her belly and she lets it ache.
She stops at a bench near a small park and sits down, and the leggings creak as her thighs spread against the wooden slats. She rests both hands on her belly, fingers laced over the warm round surface of it, and watches people walk past. A couple across the path is eating ice cream. A jogger passes with their eyes forward. Nobody is looking at her now, and somehow that feels just as good as when they were. She's outside, in clothes that leave almost nothing to the imagination, and she hasn't disappeared.