Weight
I was gaining weight. Everyone was too polite to notice. I worked in a sweet shop, and every day I swished up the road to work with a candour I'd hoped was Plucky, or Sassy, in a different patterned skirt. Gone were the days of being a wisp of a girl, of being pale, fragile, almost air-borne. Instead, I felt myself being pulled insolubly toward the earth. I was gaining a little each day which amounted to a lot.
If I fell, I was sure I would bounce, re-bound like an astronaut on the moon. On one hand it was grotesque, on the other, sort of friendly. I did nothing to deter this gain. I lunched on the sweets in the shop, and at the end of the day I swept all the crumbled bon-bons off the counter and into a paper box, and took it home for dinner. It was a losing battle. No, it wasn't a battle. It was an ascension, or a descent, however you put it. "It is part process, part instrumental." I didn't even know if it made sense to describe it like that; it is what I said on the telephone to my mother.
"You clever girl," she replied."You clever, clever girl."
I thought of the day I got so heavy that the ground caved in, and I shot right down through to the centre of earth. In some mythologies that was where Hell resided. Not away, not divorced from our trevails as Heaven would be, but somewhat near, somewhere attainable, somewhere merely beneath. Beneath the yawning moles, the oblivious earthworms, beneath the silt and the skeletons, beneath oil, beneath magma, beneath a pair of white sneakers tapping under a wooden table, tapping away an hour. I thought, how horrible if I was stuck in Hell, just because I was so damn heavy and the world couldn't find any other way to contain me.
By then, I estimated, I would be the size of a wrecking-ball. It would be your standard day in hell. A couple of skinny little minions with crooked horns would be going about their business and then I'd come careening through the ceiling with a force so resolute it could only translate into grace- the transient, unsettling grace of the intruder. I would crush a few of them. And I'd be stuck down there forever. Poor me, what did I do to deserve it?
This is the reverie I allowed myself, during an off-peak lull (during school and office hours) at the sweet shop. I could count my offences in life on one hand; they were not severe. I was an honest girl. I am an honest girl. I thought of my future, round, corpulent self, dusting off in Hell, blameless, stuck there for sheer size alone. There were too many people in the city where I lived. I estimated that at the current rate of gain, in about 40 days I would be the size of two people. This wouldn't do. Perhaps the police would come in and remove me, deport me somewhere remote. Perhaps in the middle of a desert where most of the women had died out and they made me into a Fertility Goddess, something tritely atavistic like that. And I wouldn't be able to run away, because I was so huge. I was gaining weight the way you gain speed; it wasn't the same as complaining about being fat, nit-picking. I was slowing down, a slow blunder.
Another side effect of the gain; I sweated. I felt like a Mob Boss on a television show, no, not a boss, maybe a high-level underling, snitching to the police, or embezzling money. And the Mob Boss would find out, interrogate me in a high-tension gambling scene. And all throughout, I'd be sweating like a maniac, and then I would be shot. The end of me. I watched too much television. I let my mind run. The bottomline was, this gain, it correlated with a perpetual sense of impending doom which I couldn't really explain to anyone.
My only friend was a girl named Juliette with thin wrists and a flimsy fringe. She was so slim she was practically transparent, and we had known each other since Secondary School. At fourteen, we were cherry chapstick and potential, bad-dressing and precocity; we were invincible. Would you believe it, back then we could have been twins, two reed-thin ingenues floating around glass shopping centres like a pair of angelfish.
Ever since I had known her I always associated her with the Shakespearean Juliet. My Juliette, of the indolent sighs, the lingering state of discontentment. I couldn't trouble her, I couldn't trouble anyone. I didn't even know what was the matter. My body was trying to tell me something, and it didn't relate to pregnancy, or disease. It was an externalisation, I didn't know how to further theorise it. There had to be a limit.
Maybe one day I'd just explode, or implode, however I chose to go. Right now it wasn't severe. I'd say the weight lent me a kind of beauty, a kind of hot-house dewiness to my skin. Me and Juliette, we weren't so young any more. My mother, she was old. Every day everyone was ageing. The more I took up space the more I kept away from others. I thought, if all this meant anything, and if it meant the end of me, what a pity to be counting down, or counting up---
Things I'd never done; physics. Absinthe. Seen a white tiger. Been to Budapest. Been in love. Shaken a tambourine. Had a child. Hung my own laundry in the settling wind. To name a few, to name a few.