chapter 2

That day, and for the rest of the week, she is constantly sucking in. Even in awkward and awful situations, she holds in her stomach for fear of looking fat, and only fat. She has never been fat.

Finding herself always winded for a lack of proper breathing, she grows light headed often. When natural urges forced her to release her hold and take a breath, it was always a breath of guilt, then some vague possibility of self-loathing that can't quite seize her yet. She fears it will be soon, though.

Melissa quits her usual appearing in the central area of the university, and puts up with the sinful atmosphere of the silent library, hiding away there instead. It is still a sort of guilt, but at least it overrides her guilt in overindulgence. She hides away here for fear of being seen. Being noticed as fat, and only fat. She has never been fat before. In a cool, isolated corner of the library where the only sound is the air conditioning and the far off sound of someone coughing, she bends down to sit on the chair. As she does so, she feels the cold touch of the metal belt on her underbelly, and she can only picture her muffin top in her mind. To match it up, she looks down at her waist. Her heart hesitates; her belly actually looks smaller than she imagined. Is she sucking in? She relaxes, but her stomach muscles are already idle. For a flittering of time, she thinks she might be in the clear. But then she checks herself. She is at risk of slipping into denial, once again. Before she can do that, she slaps herself and stares dead ahead as she solemnly declares to herself, in her mind, that she shall never again deny her state, or think of it as being "not that bad". It *is* that bad. Any fat, no matter how much fat, is fat, and so she is fat no matter how she likes it. And she likes it not at all.

But this is enough thinking and moaning for now. She has work to do. For some unknown reason, today she has felt a stronger urge than ever to push through with starting writing again. It is as if some faint voice is calling to her, to show her something in the great big vagueness that is her story. But something looms in the fog today. If she pays enough attention, if she pushes towards it, whatever it is, she might just come to know something.

Two empty hours of trying bear no fruit. She quits. Even though the shape in the mist remains, she has gotten no closer. Her limbs wonder what it would be like to move. She gets up and moves about the library, gazing on books, glancing over their pages and letting them impress on her some kind of form. The stairs represent to her the immensity of empathising with her character - a girl she realizes she does not know yet. Melissa mounts the stairs, ascending them step by step, flight by flight and stands upon the topmost step looking ahead. She sees what she expected to see - the rest of the university. But what does she expect to see in the fog of her story? How must she find something she isn't really sure is even there? She ascends another flight of stairs to the main level and the thronging crowds. Maybe Melissa can find her character among these people. How many are here? A hundred? Many hundreds? What are the statistical odds someone might be like her story's character? Fair enough, she thinks. But she is not in the nose of the room. A flock of birds squawk past outside. She is not in them either. The light outside is approaching something like dusk, but more yellow than red. Yellow like street lights. Her character wouldn't be out at night, anyway; she'd be at home, by herself, struggling with something. Melissa recognises the absence of a name. She'd never named the character. Wandering through the people and tables, she watches people eating together, and looks for a name. Any name.

A girl with her friends laughs overloud nearby, much like the character. Melissa looks at the girl, and feels as if she has the name "Danielle". That is the wrong name. Both for the girl and the character. Charlene. There it is. Melissa matches the name Charlene to the soul of her story's character and finds that they phonetically embrace.

The aromas of food and afternoon coffee congeal around her. But still, Charlene is not in them - she is absent from them. The colours in the signwork of "Deano's" are and are not Charlene. The khaki is, but the black is not. Perhaps she is in the cash piece of cake behind the glass casing. Of course she is. Charlene is also in the register, as a cashier herself. The dollar bills are papery in her fingers. Charlene is in them only insofar as she has been paid that week. Melissa supposes that Charlene's pay often lapses, thanks to her shitty boss who considers his workers' payday a second-to-third priority sort of matter. The sugar of the cake hitting the backs of her jaws - Charlene is there. Charlene struggles with her weight particularly. That creamy sugar, twisting around her tongue, dancing down her throat to set quick flame to her soul.

Melissa wakes up. She shoves the saucer away and sits back in shock.

For a moment, all things seem quiet. It is her, hating herself. What is she doing? A half eaten chocolate mud cake sits before her all mushed up by the spoon. The university buzzes around her. No one seems to seen her.

With caution, she nudges the plate further and further away until she is bent over the table. Sitting back, she stares at the triangle of brown mush, sneering. She takes a breath and looks around. What has she done? She has bought junk on a hazy-minded whim, sat down and gorged on it. Gorging is bad. It makes you disgusting, and a pig, and it makes you fat. Fatness, and ugliness, and guilt. Guilt and pain. Pain and hate of the self, and wanting to stop, but not stopping, and awful deep knives in the heart, but you can't stop, and the struggle to be better, and not ugly, and not fat and big, and wishing you could be normal, not big, just like Charlene wishes. Charlene, struggling like this.

Finally Melissa realizes she is staring at the table. She looks up, and wonders if she has stumbled on something.

Again, that feeling of a thing, looming in the great mist of her story, standing just between there and not there. Which one? Melissa picks at her fingernails, trying to recall the moment she felt the bump in her train of thought.
Charlene. Melissa sits up straight, straddling upon the fence of a thought.

All this, Melissa thinks, must be like what Charlene is feeling. There it is. The thought.

The temperature seems to warm, and something resolves itself before her.
Charlene has a struggle, one of many, that Melissa cannot understand and never has. Charlene struggles with her weight. Melissa has no idea what Charlene's definite weight is, but she knows it is inflated enough to deflate her ego. It is the dead limb that stops Charlene that one crucial moment she could decide to do something great, but doesn't.

What it is like to struggle with weight like that is something Melissa does not know about. But then she glances at her own self. Her own body. Her waist already has one foot on the path... Does Melissa know, already?

No, she decides she does not. Surely she is not as big as Charlene. Or is that simply more denial? No. Melissa might have some clue what it is like to be Charlene, but it the presence of that kind of monster would be pathetic and weak beside the power of Charlene's inner demon.
Overwhelmed by what it all means, Melissa goes to stand up, but halts. Might she face this? She has been chastising, self-flagellating herself so long for fleeing from her problems. The hypocrisy in fleeing yet again would be her greatest failure yet, the painting of yet another stroke of foul colour on the canvas of her dignity she wants to have. Now, in the midst of confusion and jeering circumstances, she calms herself by laying out her thoughts and her options.

Melissa has realized that the reason she cannot move on in her story because she cannot move along with Charlene. She does not know her yet. She does not know her because she has never struggled with weight.

But Melissa, just now, is beginning to know something about what it is like to struggle that way. Does she know enough? No. Charlene is bigger than her, so there is no way Melissa can know. Not yet, at least.

So a solution presents itself. It is ugly, and dark like a cloud heavy with with stigma: To truly understand Charlene, Melissa could get get fat.

Eyes wide, Melissa sits amazed at the absurdity of the thoughts she is having. She can quite literally put on weight just to empathize with Charlene, and let Charlene show her how to overcome the fears it entails. Some sort of deep warmth, hereunto unfelt, kindles in Melissa's heart at the thought of Charlene's human bravery and begins to flare upwards into the rest of her. Respect for the imaginary girl pulls Melissa over one side of the threshold by the hand, gently, but then a dull ache checks her movement, and stays her. Regret is all she sees ahead, layed like waystones along a wrongly taken road, each one inscribed with a sin committed, or an insult thrown directly at her being.

But is this not exactly how Charlene would feel? But in reality? How awful it would be in reality.

Cowardice seems worse to Melissa in this moment of flying thought. Cowardice in which she will forfeit authorial and artistic greatness for a measly sum of contentedness, and safety from shame. Pathetic. It is as if the shame she feels of selling out is more than the shame of size. She must choose one. She must choose here, now, among the crowd. Whatever is my next thought, she declares to herself, I will follow: follow until I die. *Until I die with authenticity, or remorse, remorse for failing in my duty.*