ON FATNESS
I
The insults around my weight had been piling up for so long, but, because I saw it as one of the less interesting things about me, I barely noticed them.
The boss pulled me into her office to encourage me to take up running, the same way she had when she had wanted to quit her previous job. How the air had filled her lungs and affirmed her life. So much so that she stayed at her job, tried to make it work for two more years until she was fired, but at least then she could do 1km in less than five minutes.
The jilted lover who, at the tail-end of our relationship, said I reminded her of her father. I had assumed she meant because of our inability to provide reassurance or our shared love for Prince. Not our fat bellies that peeked out at the bottom of our soccer shirts, his Barcelona, mine Real Madrid.
Or the grinning gym employee who flagged me down at a mall and gestured for me to take off my headphones – I was in
