Chapter 1

Yeah, this was not the future I saw for myself.

This was supposed to be the year I finished my degree and got some impressive data security job, finally making real fuck you money. It was to be the year I moved out of my sister’s house, got my own place. The year I attempted to start dating, maybe even the year I got a girlfriend, or at the very least got to fuck someone I didn’t have to pay.

After all, I’d lost over a hundred and fifty pounds. I was on fire. I could feel it in every cell of my body, that I was on the cusp of the getting a life. I was ready to socialize (not a sensation I was familiar with) and be some happy shiny normie with the kinds of problems that are fun to talk about, not depressing or awkward like all my problems are.

But then the pandemic happened.

Now I’m almost back to my heaviest weight.

This is the second time in my life that I’ve lost over a hundred pounds and gained it all back. Somehow it feels even worse than the first time. The first time, it’s a setback. Something you can recover from. But twice? That’s not a setback, it’s a pattern. You’re just a yo-yo dieter.

Which in a way, means fuck it, right? I can lose weight again when my size becomes too painful to tolerate. It’s leeway, it means I’ve still got another forty pounds I can gain before I absolutely must stop and take it down a notch with the constant eating. Cause that’s another thing about having recently lost a ton of weight. Before I’d ever lost weight, I didn’t really eat that much. At least not to the extent you’d expect from looking at me. But now that I’ve experienced extended dieting in all its fucking annoying glory, I cannot. Stop. Eating. It’s like my body is deliberately trying to make up for the past year of eating healthy, by binging as much as physically possible.

I work from home doing tech support. It’s shit. Nothing technical about it really, just a test of how long you can stand getting yelled at by boomers who want a free laptop. You’re not supposed to eat or drink while on call, but no one’s ever called me out on it before. Being able to snack on these calls is the only thing keeping me from snapping and yelling back. So, I snack constantly. All day long.

Then once the day mercifully finishes, I celebrate with dinner in bed and some time on the Xbox. Footnote: ‘Some time on the Xbox’ meaning the rest of the day till three in the morning and ‘dinner’ meaning stuffing myself till I pass out.

It was early still, only about eight in the evening, and I’d already eaten most of the decent stuff I had in my freezer. I felt inflated, so full if I moved too much I might vomit. My breathing so loud and strained I could hear myself even over the chatter through my headphones. My belly felt tight and bloated under my forearms. Ugh why do I do this to myself?

A knock on the door. My sister Jasmine poked her head in, “Hey just baked some cinnamon rolls if you’d like some.”

It used to really piss me off last year when I was serious about weight loss how often she’d tempt me both by continuing to buy whatever delicious food she wanted and by daring to be generous enough to always offer me some. I accused her of sabotaging me, enabling me. I accused her of being jealous of the new healthy lifestyle I was about to get.

But the truth is, her intentions were good. I think. She was much older than me and had always gone out of her way to make sure I was happy.

Most of me genuinely did not want the cinnamon rolls. Most of me was nauseated at the thought of eating more.

“Sweet yeah, I’m coming.”

But I had a very active imagination. And the moment the words cinnamon rolls left her mouth, I could already taste them. You can make me crave just about anything, just by mentioning that it’s there. Accessible and waiting for me in the kitchen. I shifted in my chair, preparing to stand. My belly folded in on itself as I leaned forward, sending a surge of nausea through me. God maybe I was too full to eat anything more. I was going to make myself sick.

It must’ve been obvious from the way I was moving, because at that point Jasmine seemed to become aware of the stack of empty packages strewn across my bed.

Her eyes trailed across the tray of thirty perfectly cleaned off bones from garlic parmesan wings, twelve empty cans of beer, several chocolate wrappers, and an empty family sized bag of chips. Though really how was she supposed to know I ate all of that within the last hour, there were plenty of other food wrappings littered all over my room, some from weeks ago probably. But she didn’t say anything, I followed her out of my room towards the kitchen.

Though I wasn’t back up to my highest yet, any amount of walking, even just short distances inside the house, reminded me why I got so intense about losing weight in the first place. My legs were stiff from sitting down all day. Stiff, sluggish, and far too weak to carry around my six-hundred-and-twenty-pound bulk without a warmup. Feeling slightly lightheaded I leaned into the walls with both arms to help me as I took each step.

“You good?”

“Yeah,” I choke out. I can barely breathe while walking, much less have a full conversation, “just feeling a little nauseous and light-headed.”

“Cause you’re on those screens all day! You probably need to eat something”

Sometimes I wonder if she genuinely means it when she says stuff like that. If she’s truly that in denial about how bad things are for me at this size. Or if she really is trying to sabotage me, after all she was there last year when I got down nearly as low as 400 pounds. She saw how much happier I was, how much more mobile I was. She watched me deteriorate back into this.

“Yeah…Just…” I paused to catch my breath, “Bring it to me over here on the couch. I need to sit down,” I plopped down into the couch, feeling the energy come back to me now that I was no longer walking. “How many did you make anyway?”

“Two packs!”

To put this into perspective, these were break and bake cinnamon rolls. One pack made about eight and was more than enough for the three of us to split. Speaking of which, “Where’s Conrad?”

“Oh, he’s out watching the game with some guys from work. Honestly, I was just wanting to hang out. I’m bored.”

She walked towards me with two baking trays, each packed with large moist cinnamon rolls, each completely drenched in frosting.

“Ah so that’s why. You thought you could lure me into watching that crazy hotep conspiracy shit again with dessert.”

She smiled, “And was I wrong? Where was the lie?”

“You could’ve just asked though.”

“Like you’d abandon your Minecraft people for me.”

“Fair point.”

For some reason, she chose to wedge herself into the couch beside me and took a massive bite out of one of the cinnamon rolls.

She positioned both trays on their own table, making it clear she assumed we’d want a full pack each to ourselves. Again, she wasn’t wrong. And we did used to eat like this all the time together before I got into weight loss last year.

I don’t remember the two of us filling this couch so completely back then, even though I’d been even bigger than I am right now. Had she gained weight lately too? I was always oblivious to noticing when other people gained weight, especially members of my own family. I could tell she was still nowhere near my size, but was she inching towards closing the gap?

I took a bite out of one of the rolls on my tray, closing my eyes to better experience the taste.

The frosting melts into my mouth, evaporating my awareness of how sick I felt before. Warm, sweet, blissful.

Wow.

I could eat a hundred of these things.

Thank god she was wise enough to make us each our own pack. I stuffed half of the next one into my mouth in one bite. I wish I didn’t eat so fast, but I can’t help myself. Jasmine had slowed her eating a bit, as she focused on her unreasonable long conspiracy theorist YouTuber nonsense, talking to me every so often about what they were saying. I couldn’t care less.

I was on my eighth and final cinnamon bun, while she had still only had five left. I tried to eat it slowly, bit by bit to savour it longer. But that only made it seem to finish faster.

No Deshaun. You cannot ask for one of hers. You’ve already eaten so much today.

But I couldn’t just sit here watching this, could I? How boring would that be. And I also couldn’t leave immediately as I finished eating, then she’d know she was right and that that is the only way she can get me to hang out with her.

“Damn, you really gon have that whole pack?” Yes, I was intentionally shaming her into giving me more. Yes, I know I’m a hypocrite.

“Like you can say shit,” she gestures to my tray, “What, are you bored already? I have wine too, if that’s what it takes to keep you around.”

I shrugged, “Sure wine will do.”

We drank straight from the bottle as per usual, passing it back and forth like pirates. Even so, I could tell I’d had much more than her.

Unfortunately, the wine only made me hungrier.

“Lemme have your last three,” my voice sounded way whinier than I intended. I swear living in this house with her is making me regress.

She looked caught off guard, “Um go ahead then? I never said you couldn’t.”

Yusss praise god. I reached over and shoveled most of the first one into my mouth.

Abruptly the door swung open.