Turn 14 of 23

Let the first day of freedom begin

The food arrives in six bags. The delivery driver leaves them at the door without knocking — they never knock anymore, not after the first few times when the smell hit them through the gap and they staggered back — and Lena listens to the footsteps recede down the hall. She can't reach the door. She hasn't been able to reach the door in years. But the bags are pushed through the gap where the door doesn't quite close, and they sit in a pile on the entryway floor, and she stares at them from the couch with the slow, burning focus of a body that knows exactly what it wants.

It takes her fifteen minutes to reach them. She leans forward — an event, not an action, the movement of a woman whose body has become its own weather system — and her fingers close around the first bag. She drags it across the carpet, through the trail of old containers and dried stains, until it reaches the couch. Then the second bag. Then the third. By the fourth she is breathing hard, her belly groaning against the couch frame, a belch rolling out of her that sounds like a door opening. She doesn't rest. She doesn't need to. She has nowhere to be.

She eats slowly. This is the first time in over a decade that a meal has not been an interruption between emails, a pause between paragraphs, a reward for a document submitted on time. It is just a meal. She tastes it — really tastes it — the garlic and oil and salt and sugar moving across her tongue with a clarity the haze has never allowed before. She chews with her mouth open. She belches between bites. She farts into the couch without shifting her weight, the sound low and long and wet, and the warmth of it spreads beneath her and she exhales slowly. A piece of pizza falls from her fingers and lands on the slope of her breast. She picks it up with her tongue.

The afternoon passes. She doesn't know what time it is because she hasn't looked. The sun moves across the ceiling — she can see it from the couch, a slow band of light that travels from the kitchen wall to the bathroom door — and she watches it the way you watch a river from a bridge, with no urgency and no destination. She eats. She drinks. She takes long draws from the vape and lets the smoke sit in her lungs until it dissolves. Her body rumbles and gurgles and releases gas in every direction, and the sounds fill the apartment like a symphony played on instruments made of flesh. She touches herself when the mood takes her — slow, clumsy, her fingers thick and soft between the folds of her thighs — and she comes with a groan that shakes the containers on the coffee table, and she doesn't clean up. She doesn't move. She lies in the warm aftermath and listens to her own heartbeat through the walls of her belly.

The light fades. The apartment settles into its permanent golden gloom — the lamp in the corner that she never turns off, the glow of the phone screen, the faint amber light from the street outside. She orders more food. She orders it because she can, because there's no schedule to interrupt, no document to finish first, no reason in the world to wait. The wish hums in her belly, warm and steady, and she feels herself growing even now — a slow, impossible expansion, her flesh pressing outward against the couch, against the floor, against the walls of a room that has become the inside of her own body. She closes her eyes. She smiles with teeth she hasn't brushed in over a decade. The first day of freedom is not an event. It is a temperature. And the temperature is perfect.