The Slow Parts: She Weighed Herself Before She Drank Any Water
Some mornings the first thing you do is look for proof. This is one of those mornings.
She is awake before the alarm.
This is how it goes now. Her body knows what day it is before she does. Some part of her that never fully sleeps has been keeping track, counting down, and now at 5:48am it nudges her out of the dark before she is ready.
She lies still for a moment. Ceiling. The particular quiet of a house that does not know it is morning yet. Her husband breathing beside her in the slow even way that used to annoy her and now just sounds like something she is not.
She gets up carefully so the mattress does not shift.
The bathroom floor is cold through her socks. She does not turn on the overhead light. Just the small one over the mirror, the one that is kinder, the one that does not ask too much of her at this hour.
She sets her phone on the counter face down.
She takes off her sweatshirt. Then her socks. There is a rule about the socks, she did not make it up, she read it somewhere, everything off, even the socks, because every ounce is a variable and she has learned to control the variables she can control.
She steps on.
Waits.
The number appears and she reads it the way you read something in a language you are still learning. First the whole of it. Then each part separately. Then the whole again.
It is the same as Wednesday.
She steps off. Steps back on. This is also part of the ritual, the second opinion, the appeal to a higher court. The number does not change. Numbers do not negotiate.
She stands there for a moment in the small light looking at nothing in particular.
She ate well yesterday. She knows she ate well because she tracked every bite with the focused attention of someone who has learned that the details matter even when the details do not seem to add up to anything. Protein first. Water after. No eating after eight. All the rules followed in the correct order.
And the number is the same as Wednesday.
She picks up her phone. Opens the app. Logs the number with the same hands that made dinner last night, that folded laundry, that held her daughter’s face when her daughter was crying about something she has already forgotten.
The graph does not move in a satisfying direction. The graph does what it wants.
She puts the phone down.
Outside the window the sky is doing that thing it does just before sunrise where it is not dark anymore but it is not light either. Just this in between color that does not have a name. She has been awake for it more times than she can count lately. She has started to think of it as hers somehow. This unnamed color. This moment nobody else in the house is seeing.
She puts her socks back on. Then her sweatshirt.
In the kitchen she fills a glass of water and drinks it standing at the sink looking out at the yard. The dog stirs in his bed in the corner, lifts his head, decides she is not interesting enough, goes back to sleep.
She thinks about the number.
Then she thinks about Wednesday. And the Wednesday before that. And the Wednesday in March when the number moved and she felt something she was almost embarrassed by, a joy so outsized for what it was, a small number on a small screen, that she did not tell anyone because how do you explain that to a person who has never stood in this bathroom in these socks at this hour looking for proof that the thing you are doing is adding up to something.
You don’t. You just carry it.
She refills the glass.
Today she will eat well again. She will track again. She will take her injection and drink her water and do the thing she has been doing quietly and without an audience for longer than she expected when she started.
The number will do what the number does.
She is still here though.
5:53am and she is still here and the sky outside is turning a color she does not have a name for and the coffee is starting and the house is still quiet and she is still in it.
That is not nothing.
She has decided it is not nothing.
The Slow Parts is a fiction series about the moments nobody posts about. If this felt familiar, it was supposed to.
Share it with the woman in your life who is in the quiet part of her journey. She will know exactly what it means.
Beautifully written and spot-on!
I feel every bit of this.