Dukan day 30:  10lbs lost.  Ten pounds in four weeks.

Numbers.  Each one representing a limit, a finite coordinate.  'The limit of n as n approaches infinity'.  Once again, limits.   

Now people notice my weight loss, my body.  My reaction to their remarks surprises me: delight, amusement, humour.  And of course, schadenfreude.  I am made more in their eyes for weighing less.  How peculiar...

I am hungry when I wake, full when I go to sleep.   I recognise when I am thirsty, parched when I open the fridge.  

I am enjoying my food, taste and touch and texture.  I am preparing food again, cutting and chopping and cooking.  I am eating en famille, chairs and cutlery and conversation.  Serving, supping, sharing.  Sacred communion.

I want to have lost a stone, a round number.   
I want to have lost all fifty pounds, my odyssey over.  
I want to know what it will feel like, this new container.

Should I not know already?  Is it not something I will recognise?  Is this a restoration, a nostalgic return or a Kafka-esque metamorphosis, a monstrous revision?  

What will emerge from this pupal intermission?  I am no butterfly wet behind my wings but neither am I a foraging caterpillar, nor yet some type of blind maggot.  I cannot excuse myself by citing the larval bulimic compulsion of the binger.   I cannot claim the natural adipose-deposition of the puppy-fatted adolescent.  I am producer, director and actor.  I have become this and now I am becoming something else.   The show must go on; I must go on.

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Container.  Body.  Envelope.  Skin.  Image.
This is my body, in which I am well-pleased.

How strange this feels.  
To speak of myself as something
Other;

Prescient,
Powerful,
Pleasure-ful,

Substance and artifice;
Semblance and desire;
Sense and jouissance.

Fair exchange is no robbery,
Apparently.




Speirbhean statue, Windsor Place, Lower Pembroke Road, Dublin 2. www.yelp.ie