The Weight

The beeping in Kaylie’s dream was the microwave timer going off.  She kept pressing the ‘Done’ button but the beeping wouldn’t stop.  It took like what seemed like minutes to realize the beeping was not the microwave, but in fact it was the alarm on her heart rate monitor watch on her nightstand.  She grabbed the watch and switched off the alarm and sat up in bed.  She went to throw her legs out bed and had an unusual amount of difficulty getting them over the edge.  Kaylie felt weighed down and sluggish.  Not out of character for a Monday, but today she felt especially slow.  Still she got up to start her day.  First stop was the tiny master bath for her contacts.  As was custom, she popped them in the dark so the bright over-sink lights would not disturb her husband Nicholas.  Kaylie next grabbed her workout stuff off the corner of the dresser and plodded down the hallway to slip on her gear where there was more light.  After a quick pit stop, she stepped onto the scale and looked down to see what damage the weekend had done to goal weight.  At first glance, she got overly excited because she thought the scale read 129, which would mean she was down 2 pounds.  Then she started to wonder if something had happened to the scale because instead of 129, she realized it read 229.  Slowly Kaylie began to take in more of her environment.  Her paradise pink pedicure was gone.  She couldn’t see the veins in her feet.  Her calves weren’t nearly as muscular as she had noticed they were after her run Saturday.  Her eyes climbed up her legs to her thighs, fat and huge and then her belly, enormous.  “What the hell?”  Kaylie thought, I must still be in bed and dreaming.  She whirled around to look in the mirror and opened her mouth to scream.  Her hair, while still short, was the tiger striped brown and bad blonde highlights from her junior year in college.  Kaylie started to make the connections.  229 was around what she weighed that year too.  When Kaylie had had dreams of college, she was usually back with her roommates on Clark Street or in the dorm and worried that she had missed her organic chem final. 

Abandoning her workout clothes, Kaylie ran back down the hall to wake up Nicholas.  Her mutt, Tuppy, began to bark at her when returned to the bedroom.  The barking woke up Nick and he rubbed his eyes as he sat up in bed, “What up pup?  Dreaming of killer attack grocery bags again?”  Nick turned over in the bed.  “Done with your workout babe?”  Nick asked Kaylie as he stared unseeing at her in the dark of the bedroom.  “Nick,” Kaylie said.  “Turn your lamp on.”  “What wrong, babe?”  Nick asked as he reached for his daylight lamp on his nightstand.  “What the hail?”  Nick yelled, as he jumped backward out of bed.  Banging into his guitar hanging on the wall to the right of his nightstand it made a hollow strum drum.  “What did you do to your hair?”  “My hair, my hair?”  Kaylie screamed, “Nick, look at me, I’ve gained a hundred pounds overnight!”  “That’s impossible.”  Nick replied but even as the words were coming out of his mouth, his eyes were digesting the image in front of him.  Slowly they finally moved from the top of her head and began to take in the rest of Kaylie’s body.

The next words out of Nick’s mouth startled Kaylie more than seeing her own tiger-striped hair.  “Where’s your scar?”  Kaylie had had her gallbladder removed three years ago.  The surgery and the pain from the gallstones that preceded its removal were what inspired Kaylie to finally face and battle the weight problem she had struggle with all her life.  Because of the large amount of belly fat and adhesions, they were unable to remove the organ laproscopically.  The resulting scar was three inches long and puckered into the stretch marks where her belly fat had been.  Kaylie touched the all too familiar reminder of her fat loaded diet and lifestyle before her weight loss.  She felt nothing but the cottage cheese skin of her belly, no scar.  “What could have happened to change my hair, my scar and make me gain 100 pounds while I was sleeping?”  Kaylie flipped on the overhead lights and closed the bedroom door so she could see herself in the full length mirror.    Stepping up to the mirror, Kaylie looked closely at her face.  “The lines around my eyes and mouth are gone, and so are the melasmas on the side of my face.”  Kaylie said to Nick over her shoulder.  The dark spots that formed on Kaylie’s face as the result of more than a decade of taking birth control pills were completely gone. “It’s not just that I gained back the weight, it’s like I look like I did when I was in college.”  “Is it possible that I could have gone back in time twenty years?”  Kaylie asked Nick.  “Why twenty?” Nick said.  “You said twenty like you know it was twenty years, but you just had your gallbladder out three years ago?  What makes you say twenty?”  “Because that’s the summer I let Tracey highlight my hair.  It was only like that for about four weeks in 1990.  When I got my next work-study check, I paid a place at the mall to fix it.” 

“This is just too much to process at one time.”  Kaylie said to Nick as she sat back down on the bed.  Nick pulled her into his arms and stroked the side of her face.  “It’s gonna be okay, babe.”  Nick said as he tried to comfort her.  Because he was spooning her, Kaylie couldn’t see Nick’s face, but she knew without seeing that the look of terror and worry on his face matched her own.



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