My Friend Andrea. Part 1.

(This was originally going to be one post, but it's long, and is getting longer. It's actually proving to be a cathartic thing to write — recounting that absurd couple of days in the not to distant past when I finally started healing.)

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My phone gave a quick buzz on my coffee table. A leaned my head forward a little to see who it was. I couldn’t make out the message, but with a little squinting, I saw it was Andrea again.

I leaned back on the couch. I didn’t want to get up, even though Netflix was in stasis, a “Do you want to keep watching” message cutting across an opaque screen with a screenshot of Ozark faded in the background.

Yes, Netflix, you judgmental little cunt, of course I want to keep watching. I know I have other shit I should be doing, but it’s already 4 p.m., and it’s not like anything else is going to happen today.

I just sat there for a few more minutes. The craziness of boredom had settled into a numb sort of haze. I was pretty sure there was still a cloud of cigarette smoke lingering in the air of my apartment, and I wondered how much carbon dioxide I was inhaling with each breath. Maybe that was a small contributing factor to my sluggishness. 

I hadn’t been outside all week. It was Wednesday. Several months before, I would be at the office, doing work I hated anyway. But I was glad to be out of there.

There were parts I missed. There’s something to be said about being forced to go into a workplace, especially for a person like me. It forces you to socialize, and from time to time, you actually meet people. But in the past period of time in my forced freelancership, the imputis wasn’t there to get out there and socialize. I was pretty sure that a number of people had already forgotten about me. Why wouldn’t they? The few people who ever called or texted to check up on me never got a response, and these days, my phone was buzzing less and less. 

But Andrea hung in there. Not obsessively so, but she was one of those rare people who wouldn’t take it personally if days, weeks would pass without hearing anything back. Catty, coy, and bitchy in a lovable too-smart-for-her-own-good kind of way, Andrea was the only real friend I had left from the office where I had spent years of my career. Even in those days before I turned in my resignation, too sick of the perverted comments, snide remarks and clients' wide eyes to want to spend another day in that shithole, she was always a ray of light. She would get me drunk and listen to me whine after work; she would always say something deprecating (either to herself or to me), but with a wink and a grin that made it alright to laugh. 

“What’s the big fucking deal,” she said once after a particularly soul crushing day. “You and I have the same-sized tits, and I turned out without a complex. Granted, I’m fat as fuck and you’ve got the body of a middle-aged lesbian, so I guess I can see why you’ve got your panties in a bunch.” Then, another round for shots. Things like that, coming from her, always made me feel better.

I knew this, so after a moment of sitting in that literal and emotional haze, I picked up my phone. There were a string of messages, mostly from her. One was a stupid cat video; one was a random gripe-fest about her erratic dating life; the most recent was a lighthearted request to know if I was dead or not. I texted her back, because I knew it would be impossible to not feel at least a little bit better by just talking to her. 

“Hey, boo,” I wrote.

“Praise Jesus,” she said. “What you doing?”

“Just Netflix. Cereal.”

“I’m getting tacos,” she said. “Come out.”

“I’m kind of settled in for the night,” I responded. 

“No you’re not. Tacos.”

“I’m good, but thanks. :-)” The emoticon was just a reflex.

“Everything OK?”

“Totes.”

The phone rang. It was her. She knew I had the damned thing in my hand, so I had to answer.

She opened with a joke. Something stupid that I can’t remember, but made me feel better. And then she slipped into a question that seemed pretty earnest, coming from her. Were she and I cool, or was I just depressed as fuck? I told her that, of course, she and I were solid. She reminded me that it had been, like a month since we had last seen each other. I went quiet for a second. Yeah, that did seem about right. I tried to think of how often I’d been out of the house in the last month. It wasn’t a lot. Only when I needed to, especially now that Amazon could deliver my groceries (even then, after one particularly creepy delivery guy, I arranged to have the bundle left outside my door).

I felt suddenly horrible. I’ve always been a homebody, but this was downright reclusive. Hermit-like. How crazy old cat ladies got started. I felt guilty about wasting time, about missing out on previous requests from all sorts of people to just come and hang out, about getting outside and enjoying some really nice weather. And most of all, here I was, at this moment, wondering if my last real current friend was giving me one more chance before she started to drift away too. 

So, I did what I had done with her a couple of times before. I broke the fuck down (fucking God bless her and her saintlike patience for my drama), and spilled everything. I told her about my most recent spurt, and how my breasts had gotten even bigger, and if I was only really busty before, now I was a complete freak. I told her about how bad the pain had been, about how scared I still was about how it could happen again, about how I had bolted the doors and drawn the curtains, and about how I was broke as shit, and had only one client, who was getting a little peeved about my pattern of radio silence. I steered away for a second by asking her how things were at the office — a weak attempt at diverting something I had actually verbalized to another human for the first time — but I didn’t get a reply.

“Well shit, Heather,” she responded after a short pause. “You said you were sick, but... how the hell bad is it?”

“I don’t know,” I responded, weakly. I’m sure there was a wet-sounding sniff in there. There was another pause. I looked down at my body, at my arm draped over the giant T shirt that obscured two freshly swollen boobs, the skin still taut, that rested in my lap. I hunched forward a little more, allowing my thighs to absorb a little more of the weight from my back. 

I tried to think of what I looked like a month ago, before this happened to me, when I was still wearing a (albiet, poor fitting) bra that I could at least find at Walmart. It seemed like a distant dream, but I don’t recall lap resting as being an option I utilized very often. And since I tried to avoid mirrors, I couldn’t give a solid answer. 

“Just… I don’t know. Double? I’m… fucking enormous, Andrea” I said, feeling for a moment even more guilty about qualifying myself in such a way to a woman who only had my best interests at heart, and who, herself, weighed around 350 pounds.

“I’m coming over.”

“No,” I said, with emphasis and clarity. “No you’re not. I’m not going to kill myself or anything. I just need some time to figure things out. I’m getting better.” I thought I was telling the truth. 

“You literally can’t just stay inside. That’s depressing as shit. It’s like a Rapunzel thing, but with tits.”

I snorted. “That makes zero sense. And no, please don’t come. You’re... 45 minutes away.”

“You don’t have to let me in if you don’t want to. I’ll just sit out in your hallway, and you can feel guilty.” She would do it, too. Before I could say anything, I got a “see you soon!” before the line went dead.

I looked around the catastrophe that was my apartment, and was embarrassed about letting anyone see it like this. I smelled something funky in addition to the smoke that still hung in the air; I hoped it was an old takeaway box, but I was pretty sure it was me. My mind flashed to the horrid state my bathroom was in, and whether or not whatever was growing in my kitchen sink had evolved to the point where it could build fire. 

For the first time in what felt like forever, I had a jolt of energy, born out of necessity. Grumbling under my breath, I got up, and found an old spandex running shirt in a pile of dirty clothes and slipped it on in place of the loose thing I had been wearing for three days straight. The hem barely stretched over my fullness, but if I was going to be cleaning, that would mean a lot of bending over and moving around, and I wasn’t used to that yet. For weeks now, I was certain that if I got slapped in the chin with my own tits, I would just curl up into a fetal position and die. Just batten them down as best I could. 

I started whizzing around the room, grabbing handfuls of whatever I could. At the time, I was stressed and a little pissed off that Andrea was taking it upon herself to intrude. But in hindsight, I was excited. Andrea always had a way of making things better. 

To be, as they say, continued...