Fall in the Fitting Room
I have gained so much weight so fast my skinny jeans beg to be saved from certain death. Twelve years ago, I weighed ninety pounds. Fall reminds me of riding my bike to the grocery store, picking up Fat Free cottage cheese and going home, picking apart the curds. Sometimes seasons bring us home, and sometime you're just overweight in sweater season, a blessing because it hides all the shame.
I have decided fall is the time of new beginnings. I put on a yoga video this morning. In time with the instructor, I did crow pose and cat cow. It won't help. When I was sixteen all those years ago, I didn't know margaritas taste better than being thin. That chips and guacamole taste better than skinny.
Fall is nostalgic because I am far from home. I flew across the country with two suitcases four years ago last month, carrying mostly clothes. I was a size four. Those days are gone, like the leaves I used to watch outside my window in Boston. They fell and sometimes decomposed, sometimes raked up and put somewhere else. I wonder where they went. Some of them blew away. Fate is often tied up in the seasons, and I like to think of fall as when I decided to buy a one way plane ticket to where I now call home and left the scale behind.
It doesn't ultimately matter what size jeans I am, because fall always comes and Fat Free cottage cheese will forever forward be replaced by margaritas and chips, no matter where we all blow away to.