A Little Bit Fat
I just found this thing I wrote in drafts, and I am posting it as is unfinished
This morning in an Uber on my way to work early for a meeting that turned out to be cancelled, I wrote a thing in my head based on a recurring vision I have of a woman in flip-flops in her car with a vente starbucks cup full of crushed ice and some kind of charm on her phone. She is wearing for sure a spaghetti strap tank and maybe a hoodie over it but if so, its a zip hoodie, and it isn’t zipped, and yoga pants. She crunches on ice, she is a domestic goddess. She is white with thin brown hair and brown eyes. She is a little bit fat.
The things that bother her pass like buzzing insects momentarily clouding her vision, and she calls someone - probably her mom - to complain, but even this is not real complaining, it’s a ritual. It has been a long time since her heart has been broken, since she was deeply uncertain about anything, since she wondered fundamentally who she is and who she might be. She is happy. She wears two rings, and they’re both probably slightly too small for her finger and if you look at them, you can catch the image of a youthful excitement for a moment. Her marriage is stable and he does love her, even though he has a habit of leaving his boxers on the floor and never does the dishes even when it is his night to do the dishes. Plus he wouldn’t go to that one concert with her either. But when she thought her cat was having a hypoglycemic event, he got up at 2 AM and drove them to emergency and paid $600 to find out it was just a hairball and he wasn’t even mad.
She doesn’t vote, not because she doesn’t vote but because nobody she knows cares about that stuff. She’s just “not really into politics.” She’s a foodie though, and a film buff. By foodie, she means that she knows what to order off a Thai menu and by film buff, she means she’s a Disney-Pixar superfan, plus that one Carry Grant movie.
Her friends make facebook events for their birthday parties, hosted at places like Dave and Buster’s, and Applebee’s. She makes a Twitter account but never uses it and can’t remember her password anymore.
When she has a bad day, she posts to her bestie group text that Betsy’s out of the office again so she had to sign for the delivery and haul packages in and then she spilled some wine on her favorite sweater and she found out her internet plan is out of its promotional period. Her boss texted and wants her to cover two extra shifts next week. Nobody tells her these are first world problems because it doesn’t occur to anyone that there’s more than one world.
There are some things she knows: don’t have sex on the first date. Don’t accept a drink from a stranger at a party, or even someone you know but not very well. Keep your promises. Treat other people the way you want to be treated.
There are also things she doesn’t know she knows. She enjoys Jasmine tea very early in the morning, when she can watch the dawn. The peace in those moments she has never used language to describe. She knows what it’s like to want a baby and lose it, the ghost futures that whisper from graves in her mind are a little bit like the time her identity was stolen but also a little bit like the tea in the morning. To the very atoms of her being, she cannot imagine wanting an abortion but then, she supposes that God has a reason for making different kinds of people.
She has donated to hundreds of Facebook fundraisers, and ran (okay, walked) the marathons for this thing or that one, served on the local animal shelter’s annual fundraising gala planning committee for seven years running now, and organized meal trains for sick co-workers.
When she gets mad at her husband for not doing the dishes for the fourth time in a row, when it’s his night, even, she does not say, “we need to talk about your sexism.” She says, “when you make me do the dishes on your night, it feels like you don’t care about me,” and then he doesn’t feel angry, he feels sad, and he does the dishes, and he says he’s sorry, and she says she knows and it’s okay. And it is okay. And she sends her friends a text about how he did them and said he was sorry and they all heart the message and none of them tell her that it’s a red flag.
She has a keychain that says “wordle addict,” but she hasn’t played it in months, not since she started using her mindfulness virtual gardening app. She is secretly afraid her husband will die before she does, and she will have to put on a brave face and she will be able to tell that people feel sorry for her.
She means to lose the fifteen extra pounds, especially in the early Summer, but then her husband always says to her he hates it when she does that. She says, “does what,” and he says, “act like a girly girl.” She says, “well what if I want a bathingsuit body,” and he says “we have traditions. we always split the banana split.” He’s stubborn, she relents. Yes, he does know what he’s doing, and yes, she does too. It’s their ritual.