Sometimes it feels like a battle, and sometimes it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean I won’t hate myself tomorrow. I wonder these things, but I don’t hate myself tonight. I wonder if I will feel awkward if I do, and if the hem of the dress is long enough to cover up the shorts. I think about wearing a dress tomorrow I wonder if I need to wear shorts underneath it, to keep my thighs from rubbing together as I walk. This move is so big that I almost feel small.
This fat, like moss grown on a river rock, is mine it is a part of me, and I cherish every part of me, even when it’s hard. There are many changes happening, but this, at least, is the same - the rise and fall of my stomach as I hold her, bulging and fat and mine. I sleep naked my first night in the city. I am something that was meant to be worshipped, like a fertility goddess or a mother. I will move every pound of me to the city’s beat. I imagine myself rising to greet the sun, a fat Harlem dyke establishing a daily routine. In my mission statement for grad school, I said, “I do not give myself many breaks.” I want to reach the end of a day in New York and be physically exhausted - proof that I am pushing myself to my very limit. She imagines the weight will melt right off me like ice cream off a cone. Despite the teensy size of my new apartment, she wants me to bring a box of jeans a size down. My mom says it is a chance to lose weight. That all the shops will have only sizes zero to six, that everyone I see will be supermodel gorgeous and skinny as a rail. “I figure everyone will be thin in NYC,” I say to a friend. I stare at her because it simply never occurred to me. When she says she’s fat, she says it like a put-down, like she’s ashamed of it. It’s so easy to see wonder in other people, not so much in yourself. She could rock any damn thing she pleased. I wonder if it’s because she’s butchier than I am or if she just feels more comfortable in the same pair of overalls I see her always wearing. “I’m not a dress girl,” she says, and I wonder why. I assume she’s confident because she acts that way. There’s a girl I have a crush on, a poet. “Fake it ’til you make it,” my therapist says, so I wear sundresses in the spring. It’s hard to look at the mirror and love yourself, and sometimes I get there and sometimes I don’t. In the summertime, we rub them with baby powder or deodorant to keep them from chafing when they rub together under dresses or skirts. But there’s something true about it for us fat girls. If a man in a writing workshop described a woman in his novel as “luscious,” I would burst out laughing. It reminds me of biting into the red flesh of a strawberry, sweet-tart and juicy and luscious. Those naps remind me of summertime, though I do this in the winter, too. I am soft to the touch like an overripe peach. I cannot be contained in any person’s hands. There is too much of me I am a cup overfilling. It is a form of self-love to press my hands against my plump belly or round, full breasts. I lie by the window in a pool of sunlight, the happiest cat in the world, the touch of my own skin, covered, always, by a silky sheet I can’t sleep without a blanket. Naps are not about dreaming, though sometimes I dream when I nap they are more about physical sensation. If napping is a sin, it is a cardinal one I am gluttonous and insatiable and I love every second of it. I take long naps, expansive like a great desert, in the mid-morning and late afternoon. It’s hard to see people laughing and wonder if they’re laughing about you. It’s hard to step into a room and feel eyes on you and you know they’re looking because you’re 10 sizes too large. It’s hard to try on a dress in a department store and not have the zipper go all the way up. Nights where I lie in bed and press my hands against my belly as if, if I pressed hard enough, my stomach would suck itself in and I would have a more traditional kind of beauty. I am supposed to hate myself, but I don’t, and sometimes I do. So shitty about myself that I can’t move. There are nights when I feel so shitty about myself that I can’t eat. I move, I groove, I feel anything other than ugly. The best I can do is compensate with good humor, laughing at my own ridiculousness. I am the world’s most awkward dancer there is nothing smooth, natural, or sultry about the way I move my body, and I have a lot of body to move. “I am making eggs!” I announce in a sing-song voice to no one, and no one hears me, except maybe my cats. I sing little nonsense songs in the kitchen.
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