I am naked

There is a mirror in front of me. I have been standing here for hours, naked and alone. The house is empty, everybody is at work and I am home. I am fat. I am unemployed. Even though it’s daytime it's still incredibly dark with the curtains closed and so every light in every room is on and I am standing in the hallway in the cold. Even though the windows are shut, I feel like I'm freezing, there is a vicious frost at my toes. February sends chills up my fingertips and into my shoulders, there are goose bumps cascading across the very large mass that is my upper arm on either side of my body. A fit of shivers pass through me and when it is over I have a heightened consciousness of the thing I am contemplating in the mirror.

My stomach is grinning at me with pathetic self-importance worn proudly like a badge. If it had an open mouth it would be full of rotten and crumbling brown teeth. I shudder to imagine the poison which my bloated belly would spew if it possessed the ability to speak. The indignance of it's cursed existence frustrates me. I hate my repugnant stomach. I am disgusted by how it entitles itself to too much space. I want to move on to a body part that I like, a part that I can respect.

I am naked.

My breasts are flopped unattractively to the sides, they look better when I lift my hands over my head, they look more like breasts I’ve seen on the BBW’s in the porno’s but my armpit hair is unsightly, I should shave but what’s the point...I’m not getting laid and after all, I don’t like the stubble I’ll get tomorrow, my armpits needn’t itch. I eye my breasts some more, I like them. These breasts, a little bit uneven and (I think) disproportionate to the size of their nipples, have the capacity to support life. I like the way they look in a good bra, I don’t mind that they are impossibly massive or that there is a solitary hair growing out of the one on the right which stubbornly reappears every time I pluck it.

I used to say I would fix them once I was done having children, I used to say they would be better if I got a breast lift and reduction but it’s not true, I am proud of their ability to capture attention and I am sorry for ever doubting their beauty because they are beautiful. I am beautiful.

I am naked.

I am completely naked.

and the way my stomach obstructs the view of my vagina is a shame.

My vagina. Wrapped in simple eloquence, dowsed in vulgar profundity. She is not an it. She is a source of too many things to confine into spoken or thought language. This vagina, all full of memories, promises and potential has long been a chasm of mysterious power that I have underestimated. She is buried beneath the pain and shame of the bane of my existence.

I should do something different. Something that makes me feel purposeful in the fight against my fat ass. I should be getting dressed, turning on my kickboxing DVD, getting ready to climb some stairs...doing something to help me acheive y lifelong desire to lose weight, but I am in awe at the way my curves pile upon themselves like a heap of chocolate ice cream, I just can’t look away from the mirror...I simply cannot move I want to stand all day staring at my body every roll, every crevice, every dimple concealing little secrets inside of them. Sheathing the most delicate peices of me away from the sight of the world.

As my secrets and shameful memories are consumed by the blubber and become invisible to the world I become invisible too.

I am just a fat woman walking down the street in clothes that don’t fit properly because I’m too fat. And my life is swallowed into a socially generated generalization about my lazy, unhealthy lard chomping fat ass.

I’d talk about what the hundreds of pounds of excess are supposed to be concealing but I am tired of fat people and all our sob stories. Right now it’s just me and my body , alone in the daylight, completely absorbed by this beautiful disaster standing before myself.