by feathers

Created on: May 14, 2008

The nights are cooler now and I can sleep. It takes a little longer for the days to warm and the bite has gone out of the sun. It won't be long now until the equinox and one more summer bites the dust. And one more summer will have passed by and I've still got a wardrobe full of fat clothes. They bulge out of the drawers and sag on their hangers. If clothes could laugh, mine would. Taunting me.

Why is it that every spring I start with those good intentions and fail? Warm weather, I think. This is great, I think. I'll be eating salads and getting out in the morning and going for a bit of a jog and I'll be wearing those cute summer clothes and going for a swim at the pool and a new cozzie. Something cute. Aqua, maybe, or pink and I'll be down on the beach looking like a million dollars and eating watermelon and drinking chilled spring water, sunlight and admiring glances reflecting off my mirror shades.

Wouldn't it be nice if all that came true? Instead I'm wearing baggy black cotton. Black, not white, even though it's a stupid colour to wear in summer because black is slimming, right? Nobody my size wears white. Not anywhere and especially not to the beach. The risk of being called Moby Dick and mistaken for a white whale is just too great.

I know I have nobody but myself to blame. I admit that at no stage during the entire summer did anyone hold a gun to my head and force me to consume that icecream. But how come it always happens? Why did those promised crisp summer salads always have half a side of barbecueued beef to go with them? Why does watermelon go so well with a nice, chilled sparkling white? Why is it so much more comfortable sitting in an airconditioned cinema catching a movie than it is sitting on the beach? Because I like eating popcorn better than I like being bitten by sandflies and wondering whether it's preferable to have sweat drip down my face and arms and back and thighs and buttcrack or to go swimming in shark-infested water that four thousand people have been peeing in and come out with a used condom stuck to the back of my leg. I also don't like getting sand in my underwear. I like the cinema better because in the dark nobody can see that I'm fat. Or that I bought a bag of peanut M&Ms to go with the popcorn.

The earth takes one more ride about the sun and I'm here, a little greyer, a little wiser maybe, but just as fat as I was last year. No lesson learned. No menu of unbeatable diet followed. The fat clothes still inhabit my wardrobe, greys and blacks of winter welcoming me, it's so much easier to hide in the winter. I tell myself that I will be like a caterpillar. That over the winter I will hide in a chrysalis of fitness and diet, that next summer I will emerge.

There's always going to be a next summer. There's always going to be hope. Thin clothes haunt the back of my wardrobe.

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