Excess baggage

by raimperial

 

Saturday morning, daylight. An old alarm clock rings by the bedside. An arm erupts like a geyser from under the sheets. Stop. A picture frame falls to the floor. A bang, a bump, a thump, a thud – and a cracking sound of glass. A woman rolls heavily out of the bed.

She looks first into the bathroom mirror, scanning herself with her eyes like they had laser lights beaming off into her reflection. With a disgruntled look, she pulls out a weighing scale from one of the cabinet drawers and takes off her slippers. She steps on it and watches the small dial swing left and right until it stops right in the middle of what looks like a plastic elementary protractor jammed on a pink rectangular plastic casing. Two hundred and sixty-six pounds.

She sits on the toilet seat, mulling over things, thinking of this new day as a bowl of hot Singapore laksa that she has never tasted before, convincing herself to try it out because everything about it is okay, everything is good, and everything is just fine. She tells herself that she just has to try it and see how her body responds to something new, something different, something unusual and exotic and unfamiliar to her senses.

This has to go.

She stares at the bathroom mirror once more and convinces herself that she doesn’t care about how she looks or how people stare at her when she’s walking down the street with gigantic layers of her belly protruding under her blouse, or how she is made fun of by her family members because of her insanely large breasts, or how her physical presence triggers the overload sensors of all the elevator shafts in the office building where she works. That she is beautiful in her own way, she knows very well. Whatever people say, she doesn’t really give a damn. She’s like that – and that is something people have to deal with and accept as a fact of life. Like gay people and marijuana.

A walk across her bedroom. A look out into the window. A catch of the sunlight on her palms.

I am beautiful the way I am.

But with this? I might just live until fifty.