Fatter - Part 1

The I’m facing the scale. It’s my daily ritual, and one that I’ve come to dread. Every time I look, the number is higher. It’s become so disheartening that I can barely bring myself to stand on the dreaded metal plate. I can’t see the LCD screen without sucking in my gut, which now sags over my own waist like some kind of dead animal.

But every morning I still do it. Call it morbid curiosity. Call it the terror of the unknown being worse than the horror of reality. Or maybe call it hope--hope that one day I’ll step on the scale and the number will be the same, or even--please God--go down.

Today was no different from yesterday. A gain of two pounds. I scrunched up my eyes to prevent a tear from falling down my fat face, a face I can barely recognize in the mirror any longer.

I don’t know what to do. But I think I know where it all started.

I’ve always been kind of big. Never huge, mind you, but square and bulky. I was always wider than most guys growing up, and that didn’t really change in adulthood. In high school I worked out to keep from going soft, but I never seemed to find the time after starting my career. I heard the dad-bod was in, so I never sweated the spare tire I’d gained. It never stopped me from getting laid, so it was never a problem.

That all changed after I got into a car accident. I was late to work, fiddling with my shirt, not really paying attention to where I was going, and then I heard a bump. I looked back and there was someone lying on the road. I was mortified. I got out to go check on them, see if they were okay, to call an ambulance.

But when I got out of my car and looked behind me, there was nobody there. Just an empty road.

I stood there, struck dumb. I didn’t get it. I’d hit someone, something. There was a dent in my car just ahead of the right fender. There was even a speck of blood! But nothing other than tire tracks indicated I’d hit anything at all.

I turned to get back into my car and came face to face with a wild-eyed man with a shock of hair and an enormous beard. He looked like a homeless guy, a crazy person you’d normally hear muttering at the subway station.

He didn’t say a word at first, just stared at me. Then he seemed to stare pointedly at a stain on my shirt--I’d been eating a breakfast croissant to save time this morning.

The man reached out, pressed a single finger into my chest, and uttered one word: “Fatter.”

Then he turned around and left as though nothing had happened.

I called out, asked for him to stop, to see if he saw what I’d hit. He didn’t look injured, he wasn’t hobbling or anything, so I didn’t think it was him, but there was nobody else on the road this early in the morning.

I got back into my car, got to work, and tried to forget this whole thing ever happened.

About a week later I noticed my pants were getting tight. A week after that and my belt wouldn’t fasten on the same hole. A few days later, I ripped my seat getting up from my desk for lunch and had to go the rest of the day with a safety pin up my ass.

That night, I got on the scale and realized I’d gained almost twenty pounds. My broad frame did a good job of hiding it, but I could tell there was some extra softness around the edges, an extra crease in my chin, and an extra bulge around my waist. I’d really packed it away in a short time and I had no idea how it’d happened.

I passed it off as nothing, got a new set of work clothes and started a diet the next day. Logically, I knew this could just be a fluke of aging and a relatively sedentary lifestyle, but in the back of my mind the memory of the homeless man on an abandoned road couldn’t be extinguished, and echoing in my cranium was the one word he spoke.