He wasn’t even sure anymore if he could jump, could get his fat ass off the ground. One more pathetic little milestone on his way down the drain.
Still, he could always find consolations. There were people out there who couldn’t get out of bed, people for whom showering was an adventure worthy of Indiana Jones. When you got as big as he was you had to budget extra time for all sorts of average things. Use your imagination: great weight makes unreasonable demands on the human body.
He woke up one morning and noticed that his feet looked like snakes that had swallowed cantaloupes (knock, knock, he thought. Who’s there? Cantaloupe. Cantaloupe who? Cantaloupe tonight, dad has the car…). He had to wear plastic sacks for socks and endure the embarrassment of wearing down booties to work. Horrible experience, as you might well imagine.
He discovered himself naked at times, puzzling before the mirror at the new and exotic contours of his body, the folds and bulges. He couldn’t deny that there was something fascinating about it. He’d been a little slip of a boy once upon a time.
He wondered: could he still dance? He didn’t care to find out. He didn’t much feel like dancing.
He recognized that he had no one to blame but himself. He’d let himself go. Any athletic endeavor –however generously defined– was out of the question. He didn’t have any interest in offering himself up as a spectacle.
So maybe his jumping days were behind him. Big deal. How important was that? What did he need to reach? Why would he want to leave the earth behind?
He was still capable of sitting still, though, and that had always been the one truly important thing he expected from his body. From what he had seen there were plenty of people who didn’t have that gift, and these poor souls seemed to him to be the truly cursed among the living.
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