skin and bones.

You know there's no rhyme or reason for the way you turned out to be.

- 'The Wire,' HAIM

I had gotten prematurely nostalgic, balancing a book on my ponderous big-ass belly, wondering what gestures I would have to evolve into when I lost the dead weight and no longer had such a soft clay body to loll with -- a thought like this, after only two weeks consistently lifting and running in the gym. 

And then I woke up with numb toes last Thursday. New thought: amputation amputation AMPUTATION AMPUTATION. I've always been a colossa, and so I've always had 'type two diabetes' as spook in the distance, something that struck me as an ultimate milestone of fat-assery. Ain't nothing wrong with being a chubette. Ain't nobody stronger than me, flab and jiggle and jowl and all. Ain't ever been afraid of walking where I needed to go. But to make yourself diabetic ... I saw, right before I'd made the decision to just goddamn do it, get up at six thirty and embarrass myself with dumbells and sweating piggishly at a light jog, a photography series called 'Half': a woman took photos of herself after incredible weight loss, documenting the loose skin that demonstrates how half of her is now missing. It shocked me. To think that there would be consequences to second-helpings, that it wasn't just a matter of me bowing my head and lettuce-ing my way to unscathed thinness and, thither, perhaps romance -- that something besides some stretch marks would stick around. My mother: 'Sophia, our actions always have consequences.'

I am not diabetic. Went to the doctor on Monday (my first time in perhaps four years), fasted, took a blood test Tuesday, and I laid out in the sun for a half hour on Wednesday after hearing 'normal' and 'healthy range' and 'good cholesterol' on my voicemail. I prayed to god before I took the test and thanked him after, because I was so glad that things had turned out for the good (Good-For, a Korsgaardian might say), but fuck, none of that good had much to do with me, I haven't been paying attention. So no amputation, it would seem. So no consequences. I told a friend this story and she asked me how I felt. I told her all the details above, and realized that there was no cogent feeling underneath it all. I spent all my relief in that sunny half-hour: what's left? It reminds me of going up to the roof of my house on January 1, 2009, to knock out the first of my New Year's resolutions and see the sunrise for the first time I could remember. (I logged a lot more at Cracker Barrel.) It was very cold, and I could see a few pickup trucks in front of McDonalds, and there was no real horizon (the view being blocked up with buildings), so there wasn't a proper sunrise in the rosy-fingered-dawn sense. It just got lighter after a time. I went inside and laid down.