Turn 50 of 228

Spend the night gaming and eating, pissing, shitting and masturbating while drunk and high. Still win all games. Wake up Sunday afternoon and reply to the office subscriber who keeps messaging about staying.

She settles onto the floor and the hardwood is warm beneath her and the console boots and the vodka opens and the first game loads and the night begins. She eats from the bags without looking — chips shoved into her mouth between rounds, cookies crushed against her belly as she holds the controller, donuts torn in halves and thirds and the crumbs fall into the fold beneath her breasts and she doesn't brush them away. The vodka burns and the weed smooths it and her body sits heavy on the floor, 288 pounds spread across the hardwood, her thighs wide and her back against the couch and her belly resting in her lap like something alive and warm. She wins the first game. She wins the second. She wins the third and fourth and fifth and the screen blurs and sharpens and her hands move without thinking and the ranking climbs and nobody beats her.

At midnight she pisses where she sits. The warmth spreads across the floor beneath her and she doesn't stand and doesn't move and the game loads again. At two she feels the pressure lower and she shifts forward onto her knees and the controller dangles from its cord and she shits on the floor behind her — a wet, heavy sound — and wipes herself on the couch cushion and sits back down and the smell rises and mixes with the weed and the vodka and the twelve days of mess already layered into the apartment's air. Her hand moves to the controller. The next match starts. She wins. Her other hand moves between her legs and she plays and touches herself at the same time — the screen bright and fast, her fingers slow and deliberate — and she comes at the end of a round she wins and the orgasm moves through her like a wave through deep water, heavy and rolling, and she doesn't stop playing.

The apartment darkens and lightens and darkens. She sleeps in fragments — twenty minutes here, an hour there, slumped against the couch with the controller on her belly and the vodka bottle between her thigh and the floor. Each time she wakes she eats and drinks and smokes and plays and wins. The pile of empty bags grows. The bottles accumulate. The floor beneath her is wet and the smell is dense and biological and entirely hers and she exists inside it the way the deep-sea creatures existed inside their darkness — without reference, without comparison, without the concept of light.

Sunday afternoon the light through the window is the color of old honey and Lena wakes with her cheek pressed against the couch and the controller dead in her hand and her belly warm and heavy on the floor beneath her. She sits up and her knees crack and her body unfolds slowly — 288 pounds, stiff, the dried mess on her thighs and belly pulling as she moves — and she reaches for the phone. The screen is bright and her eyes narrow against it and she opens the private messages. The office subscriber has written again. The message is from 3 AM. *I locked my door for four hours yesterday and didn't do anything. I keep watching your video and thinking about staying. Not staying here. Staying the way you stayed. I don't know what that means yet but I know I can't keep pretending it doesn't mean something.*

Lena reads it three times. The apartment is quiet. The console hums in sleep mode. The smell of her own body fills the room like weather. She types slowly — not because the words are hard but because she wants them right. *It means whatever you decide it means. I can't tell you what staying looks like for you. I can tell you what it looked like for me: I stopped cleaning up. I stopped hiding. I stopped performing comfort for other people and started actually being comfortable. It cost me everything I was pretending to be and none of what was real. You locked your door for four hours. That's not nothing. That's the first night you didn't perform. The question isn't whether you'll stay. The question is whether you'll stop pretending you were ever really here.* She reads it once and sends it and sets the phone on the floor and picks up the controller and starts a new match and wins.