Fat. Fat! Fat? FAT. Yes, fat. Fatter and fatter—fatness and fattening.
Fat: the word ripples with eroticism. Just saying it—just thinking it!—just letting the word fill my mouth, trickle down my throat, settle into my fat belly fills me with a burning, passionate desire that can never be fully realized: fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.
I love this word, “fat.” I love the way the “f” stands solid, sturdy at the start, gesturing gently toward the plump, round “a,” which sits squatly centered. When capitalized, the F seems to point rightward, its two short horizontal lines leading the eye into the rest of the word. A lowercase “f” is rounded at its peak, the top of the ascender, as if the harsh and stately angles of the uppercase F have expanded outward and downward, fatly flopping over the vertical spine that props the letter up. Anchoring the word is a portly “a,” a convex bulge of rolls and swelling circles and semicircles; the “a” is a torso, a midsection, that has ballooned out of itself and now allows its excesses to rest—sleepy, lazy, gluttonous—atop the misshapen bowl at its bottom. The “t” inverts the beginning of the word: in many fonts, including the one I’m using now, the “t” is an “f” that has been mirrored vertically, the rounded ascender at the top of the “f” now swinging amply as the rounded terminal of the “t.” Like a belly squeezing up over too-tight pants, the “a” *just barely* squeaks its tiny top through the imaginary line connecting the crossbar of the “f” and the “t”: fat.
Fat. fAt. faT. FAt. fAT. FaT. I can’t get enough. Say it again! Say it louder! Give me more! I want it all! FAT!
It’s addicting, fat. It’s addicting to say the word, and it’s even more addicting to have it, to watch your own fat body expand with every gluttonous, caloric meal; to grab strongly a soft roll of belly fat, allowing the belly fat to fill completely your hand and spill out over your fingers; or to watch as your fat spreads itself horizontally outward from your hips when you sit slowly down; or to be standing up straight and to feel the gentle tickle of your jiggly belly bouncing off the top of your thighs, f-f-f-at, f-f-f-at, f-f-f-at, a tiny ripple spreading itself up from bottom to top of belly, as you take a step; or to feel the chaotic simmering of cellulite that announces your every move; or to notice the blubber that has ballooned around your upper arm so that your bicep and tricep appear less like a limb and more like a small round orb, and to feel this part of your arm, absent from those slender bodies that sleek around outside, wobble loosely when you extend your arm outward; or to notice the rolls that bubble into more rolls when you tilt your head downwards; or to catch a passing glimpse of a double chin that has parked itself permanently not far below your mouth—to feel your own fat body bubbling with jiggly fat rolls is to feel yourself losing control to the erotic gluttony that urges you to become ever fatter.
It’s a tautology: I say the word “fat” and feel myself tingle with desire, and I want to become fat; I eat and eat and eat so that I become fat; I watch myself become fatter and fatter; and watching myself become fatter and fatter makes me want to whisper the word, over and over and over again, first inside my head then aloud: fat! fat! fat! fat! Let the cycle begin again; let me eat; let me grow fatter; let me watch my fat body expand into its new and fatter fatness; and let me start again. Fat, fat, fat, fat!
The word is an incantation that begins when my top teeth press themselves seductively into my lower lip to form, quietly, the sound of an “f.” My mouth opens wide, as if to eat a fattening caloric treat, to breath into a swallowed “a,” before my tongue slips up to the roof of my mouth and taps the back of my teeth, “t.” The shape of the mouth when it pronounces the word “fat” seems to enact and to suggest the very motions and actions that will make my body fatter—the act of biting, of chewing, of swallowing. The play of the teeth and lips and tongue as they bounce around in my mouth when I say the word again, again—fat, fat, fat—recalls for me my own obsessive eating. The clamp of my teeth as they tear into a freshly baked donut, the practiced power of my tongue as it pushes the sugar into the deepest recesses of my mouth, the calibrated clamp of teeth as they prepare my calories for their permanent home in my expanding belly—to say the word “fat” is to practice these motions, and to eat is to prepare yourself to announce the word, and to announce your own body, FAT.
I’ve been a greedy, fat piggy today. I started the morning with a huge breakfast sandwich oozing with melted cheese. For lunch I stuffed myself with a two-person mac and cheese meal, four donuts, a king-sized Reeses’s, and a Snickers ice cream bar. Pepperoni pizza, thousands of calories worth, was dinner; there’s a slice leftover for a midnight snack. As I write this, I’m finishing off the remaining two donuts from my half-dozen box and diving into a MASSIVE 1000+ calorie slice of carrot cake. If I’m lucky I’ll get to have another Snickers ice cream or two before I let myself drift drunkenly and fatly off to sleep, where I’ll dream of eating myself fatter, the word fat circling round my fat dreams and puncturing fat my every fat desire.
Fat. Fat. Fat! FAT! Fatness and fattening—fatter and fatter. Fat bellies and fat thighs, fat arms and fat chins, fat faces and fat hips, fat breasts and fat rolls and jiggly mounds of fat piled on top of fat. I want it all, the fat, I want the fat to swarm into my body and to swell outward from my body and to wobble delicately off my body with every fat movement.
Let there be fat, I say! Let my fat body be fatter, and then fatter still!
Repeat after me: fat. Fat. Fat. Fat. Fat. Fat. Fat. Fat. Fat. Fat. Fat. fat. fat. fat. fat. fat. fat. fat. fat. fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfatfafatfffffaaaaaaattttttt
My Life as a Fat Girl 