Chapter 3

The next morning Ana woke up with an unusual zest for life, just brimming with energy. Rather than hit the snooze button on her alarm several times, Ana got out of bed, started the coffee pot, and set to work cooking a hearty breakfast from scratch.

As Ana washed her dishes from her large breakfast, she wondered what she could do to keep this good mood going. ‘What does my reflection normally do?' Ana thought to herself. The coffee shop! Ana's reflection was always getting large sugary coffees with mountains of whipped cream and pastries on her way to work. ‘These gluttonous impulses have served me well so far,’ Ana reasoned, as she set off to grab some liquid calories on her way in to the office.

Walking in to the office, Ana couldn't help but noticed a kind of judgmental stare from many of her fellow co-workers. Ana was far from the only fit and athletic woman in the office, and not one of her colleagues would be caught dead carrying a fattucino like the one she had strolled in with. Ana was immediately embarrassed. How could she undo so much hard work in just a few hours because of a strange reflection only she could see? She was obviously letting her imagination get the better of her.

When Ana got to her desk, she threw away the rest of her unfinished coffee and shook her head in disappointment at how silly she was being. As Ana's embarrassment and anxiety festered, her customary depressive fog rolled back in to suffocate her gluttony-induced excitement. Ana barely got anything done that day it seemed. In fact, she couldn't for the life her remember what she had done, if anything, for the last half hour. That was, until a rare reflection from the glossy top of her desk caught her eye. It was a low angle view showing a burgeoning double chin on her chubby doppleganger. She was talking selfies of herself, it seemed. The jealousy Ana experienced immediately felt unnatural, and so she buried the thoughts in attempt to ignore her temptations.

'I'm going to skip lunch and go to the gym for an extra hour every day this week.' Ana told herself, 'then I'll be back on track.' Maybe once she shifted a couple of pounds or built up her glutes some more, she could attract a partner to help forget all this silly nonsense with her ballooning reflection.

It was a lie she told herself, of course—a distraction to keep herself from following what she was secretly afraid is what she really wanted.