Kinktober Day 18: Weight Gain Wish

The sense of feeling not quite right in one’s body had dogged her from the time she’d understood that she had a body. She could never pinpoint why. When she tried to find the right words, nothing seemed to suit. Something was wrong in a way that felt bigger than she was able to comprehend or verbalize, even in her own thoughts.

She wasn’t sure why she felt such a pervasive sense of wrongness. She was beautiful according to the standards of the day. She moved through the world with long, willowy limbs and sharp, catlike features. She would’ve been wealthy if she’d had a dollar for every time someone told her she could be a model. She could see herself in the mirror and understand what people saw. She thought she was beautiful, too. Just… there was something missing. Trying to discern what it was was like having a thought on the tip of her tongue and then losing it just as she opened her mouth to speak it aloud.

When she saw other people who were apparently comfortable in their own skin, she felt an unspeakable jealousy. This went doubly for anyone who looked very different from her. She would look at people with curved shoulders, rounded cheeks, and rolls in places where she only had hard bones and skin stretched tight over them and feel profound sadness. She never realized she did not feel this way about more muscular people, or shorter people, or people who were like her but presented themselves differently.

It took until her thirtieth birthday for her to find a solution. A friend gifted her a consultation with a famous psychic, “just for fun!” She had never had much interest in the occult—she could barely remember her own astrology sign—but went anyway. She told herself it was only because she didn’t want to insult her friend by letting the gift go to waste.

The psychic was kind and had a laugh like thunderclaps. She felt comfortable in her presence immediately, though she couldn’t say why.

The psychic told her that she could sense there was a hole in her heart, and said she had a way to repair it. They talked for a long while, and for the first time, she felt like someone understood her. It was silly that it was a psychic, but as the other woman took her hands and asked her to wish for the thing she wanted most, something about it felt right and true.

The psychic smiled at her as she left and told her to come back if she ever needed anything else. Her heart felt light as she headed home.

In the following weeks, that lightness followed her. Nothing had really changed in her life, and she thought that maybe voicing her discomfort had helped her come to terms with it. She still couldn’t name it, still couldn’t find the right phrasing, but the feeling began to dissipate.

Then one day, she wasn’t able to button her jeans. She had pulled them on with just the slightest difficulty, absentmindedly thinking they’d stiffened up while they hung up to dry. But then the button wouldn’t close. She had no idea how to handle it. She hadn’t outgrown clothes since she was a teen. Her hand crept down to the spot between her hips where her jeans should’ve been sitting and found… softness. Barely there, but enough that her fingertips sank in, just enough to notice. She couldn’t explain why she felt so elated by the change, but she couldn’t stop smiling.

More changes arrived swiftly on the heels of the first. It felt like she noticed something new every other day. Like realizing she actually needed to wear a proper bra because she actually had something to put inside one. The continued softening of her stomach, until she had an actual tummy that puffed out a little. Her collarbones, cheekbones, elbows, knees all becoming less sharp.

She should’ve been worried. She was going up a dress size every other week despite the fact that up until recently, her figure had been so stable she could fit into many of her favorite outfits from when she was sixteen. But all she could find room for was joy. She loved looking at herself, loved wrapping herself in hugs in the shower and grinning because for the first time, her body was starting to feel good. She didn’t know why. Her eating habits hadn’t changed and she was still just as active as she’d always been, using her bike to get to work and run errands and going to the gym a few times a week.

By the time six months had passed, she was certifiably chubby. Even being as tall as she was, she was all convex curves and squishiness. She felt like she was home.

Her friends and family shared their concerns with her, telling her she’d need to watch her weight now that she wasn’t in her twenties anymore, all but chiding her for getting fat. How was she supposed to tell them that she was watching her weight—and that she celebrated every time she stepped on the scale and saw the number ticking a little higher than a few days before?

Her size did require some adjustments. She took up yoga to make sure she was maintaining her flexibility, and she had to find new places to buy clothes. Strangers treated her differently. When she rode public transit, she had to remember that she took up a little more than a single seat now, her soft bottom and hips and thighs spreading around her. It was all new and exciting and even the minor inconveniences felt like gifts.

By the time she turned thirty-one, she had gotten comfortable calling herself fat. She’d had to—it was one of the only ways to accurately describe herself. She looked back on photos of herself from six months ago and scoffed at how skinny she still was. Now, she was big enough to break chairs and make people sweat when she got into an elevator after them, their minds whirring as they tried to determine whether her bulk would put the elevator over its weight limit.

And she was happy. She weighed as much as her old self four times over. Every part of her was soft, buried in layers of cushiony fat. She loved her face the most. It was cherubic—happy and round where before it had been angular. She took selfies that accentuated her double chin and plump cheeks, unable to stop admiring herself. She took pride in her big belly, in the draping softness of her arms. She thought her chubby feet and thick calves were adorable.

Finally, after three decades walking the earth and feeling like everything was deeply wrong, she felt right.