A Taste of Midnight

Chapter 1: Dear Diary

Have you ever savored a taste so much that after the first bite you stopped eating, because finishing it felt somehow worse than wanting it?

I have.

I became very good at wanting things.

Wanting and not having, that is.

Wanting and pretending not to want.

Wanting and making rules.

That was how I stayed thin...

It was also how I stayed alone.

But...I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning.

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December 31.

Eight o'clock.

New Year's Eve.

Room 1101 at the Belvedere Hotel, Manhattan.

I can barely breathe.

My hands are trembling.

My heart is pounding.

And...I'm scared.

Four more hours to go...

On the dining table are four white candles.

One for each New Year's Eve since Robert and I met.

I light the first.

Then the second.

The third.

My hand hesitates over the fourth.

Across the room, reflected in the black window, is a woman I almost recognize.

I turn sideways and so does she.

Then I laugh at myself for doing it.

My dress is black, sleeveless, expensive, and purchased months ago when I was thirty pounds lighter. It still fits, technically, but it no longer falls straight from my ribs. It curves around a soft stomach I didn't own back then. My hips push against the silk, softer and wider than they have any right to be. And when I sit? There is a definite fold beneath my navel that some have mistaken for pregnancy. The fools.

I run my fingertips along the new bulge, and my contact is not accidental.

Far from it.

That is the part no one understands.

I wanted this.

Not the way people say they want to stop worrying aboutcalories on vacation. Not the way someone jokes about gaining five pounds over Christmas.

No...I wanted...weight.

I had wanted it since I was eighteen, even though back then I didn't know what to call it. This...fetish.

All I knew was that I wanted softness.

I wanted my thighs to touch.

I wanted a stomach that remained when I stopped sucking it in.

I wanted breasts made heavier by ordinary abundance, hips that took up more room in chairs, arms that looked soft when I folded them.

I couldn't even begin to tell you where these feelings came from, other than as I approached my eighteenth birthday, the urge to change became stronger.

When I woke up that morning, all those years ago, I had a singular thought running through my head. It hurt, how much it consumed me, but once I recognized it for what it was, I never let it go.

I wanted to know what it would feel like to become...fat.

There.

I wrote it.

Fat.

Now, even alone, the word makes my pulse quicken.

For most of my life I treated the desire like a criminal impulse. Somehow, I knew that if I shared this desire with the world, they might not understand. After all, how would I even begin to explain it-even to my best friend? And so, I just knew, deep down, that if I'd told anyone of this secret desire, something might change between us.

And so, I became disciplined, instead.

I locked those feelings deep down inside myself, not daring to let them out.

For, if I did, I wasn't sure if I could ever control them ever again.

But not before the one time I did allow myself to indulge.

It was the very night I'd turned eighteen.

There I was, alone in my bedroom, stuffed from the food I'd eaten throughout the day. I was still riding high from the celebration party my parents had thrown me. All my friends were there.

Yet, somehow, I was distracted by the feelings I'd tamped down all morning.

Fat...

Fat...

Fat..

I remember lying in bed, my hands sliding over my stomach, feeling the softness. Of one too many slices of pizza. One too many glasses of punch. That extra slice of cake I didn't need, but somehow forced myself to have.

A tingle surged through me then. I didn't know what it was. It traveled from my navel all the way to the space between my legs. I didn't know then what I know now, but I liked that feeling. And when it disappeared, I knew I wanted to get it back.

So, I pressed my hands into my stomach, along my sides, feeling the fullness and swell of my body. The tingle returned, this time a little more intently.

I pressed my hands into my body again, this time, allowing them to roam across my breasts. The tingle intensified still further.

And when I dared, for the first time (yes, I've made up for a lot of lost time since then) to place a hand between my legs, I was finally able to connect the dots.

The sensation of weight and pleasure were solidified that night. But it was also the last time that I'd allowed myself to experience that level of pleasure.

For, unaware of my new discovery, I had failed to recognize how loud I'd become. Noises of pleasure vibrated through my throat as my hands worked my body under the sheets. Twisting legs and tangled clothing consumed me as my body revealed the confines of what it meant to be truly alive inside oneself.

Then my mother barged in.

I don't remember all the words she yelled at me that night as she dragged me up out of bed by the wrist and forced me into the bathroom to shower off my sins, but a few words still echo inside my head, 'whore', 'slut', 'degenerate'.

I won't bore you with the details, but let's say my therapist and I are still working through that kind of trauma.

And so, for years, I shut myself off and focused on discipline instead.

Years went by and I was thankful that college was a short time away.

Then I graduated and I moved out, got an apartment of my own. But still I kept myself in check. Somehow, the anchor memory of my first night of discovery, followed by my first night of ultimate shame kept me closeted.

Repressed.

I mostly avoided sex and kept only a few friends.

I ran before work.

I ordered dressing on the side.

I knew the calories in almonds, avocados, olive oil and wine without needing to look them up.

I could estimate another woman's weight within five pounds because I was always calculating my own.

People admired my self-control.

At work, they called me 'a high achiever', 'dedicated' and 'the cerebral assassin'. I work in finance, and I guess the numbers that ran around in my head when it came to my own body were just as easy elsewhere.

And despite my rise at work, my co-workers had no idea it was fear I was hiding behind.

I had convinced myself that the world tells women that gaining weight is what happens when they stop paying attention.

For me, staying thin was what happened when I never stopped.

Alone, in my hotel room, I lift my champagne.

"Courage," I tell the woman in the window.

She lifts hers too.

I look down at the candles now burning before me.

Three years ago tonight, I met Robert Gaines.

And the first thing he ever saw me eat...was dessert.

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