Folakemi’s Jeans
Folake had imagined that after a consistent nineteen days of eating ‘real’ food and working out five to six days a week, she would be okay sliding back into her jeans. So on the morning of the nineteenth day after giving her life to health, she ignored the comfortable companion and soft friend she had found in her sweatpants and reached up to the highest shelf at the back of her cupboard, where she had thrown the unforgiving pair of jeans, (quite aggressively and with much anger and frustration), to retrieve them.
To be safe, and because the weather smiled on her attempt that morning, she had opted for a thin pair of tights- so as to avoid the extra layer of fabric replacing the inches she believed she had so painstakingly lost. As she put her first foot in what already seemed like a very spacious hole, she held her breath, hoping that the temporary loss of oxygen would somehow shrink her thighs even further. The first leg went through, and then the other. Now all she had to do, was pull the pair of jeans up, and button them. Easy-peasy right ? Wrong.
Thankfully, this journey of denim up her thighs wasn’t the kind where one is rolling all over the floor and sucking all suckable things in and praying and praying because there is really nothing else to wear that fits. No, it wasn’t so bad. Haba, she had been eating vegetables for lunch for two weeks.
The journey was more like that uphill journey where you do suck in your tummy, as if the denim going up your thighs is affected by such suffocation. Luckily the needless loss of breath is short-lived because the denim is the stretchy kind that just makes it to the bottom of your bum.
So there Folake is, standing with a pair of jeans at the bottom of her bum. Panting from suffocation by stubbornness, wondering who sent her message. She is not a quitter. And she takes only yes answers. So, she continues her quest. This time sucking in the other direction, clenching her butt cheeks so tightly, she is surprised her glutes didn’t spasm in the process.
Jumpin jumpin ... she tried to turn the embarrassing act into a destiny’s child-inspired musical, but it only made her more out of breath. Besides she couldn’t jump to the beat of the song fast enough. So she gave up and concentrated on wriggling her way into these pair of jeans, that weren’t even that great to begin with - or so she began to tell herself as she felt the beads of sweat rolling down her back. Undeterred, she told herself she was sweating from the steamy shower she had just had.
At this point you would think Folakemi would have gotten her answer - the simple fact that she hadn’t lost enough weight to fit in the jeans she had purchased only two months prior, the same pair of jeans that, at the time, felt “slightly loose”. But somehow, given her scale indicating she had lost “only” one kilogram, she needed some surer form of confirmation that she was not rolling a boulder up a hill.
Anyway, the pair of jeans did make it to her waist. And with a few more jumps, got right under her belly button. They were high-waisted jeans you see. She prefers those because they flatter her ~belly~ shape. But seeing as her thighs and bum had taken up most of the material. There was not much high left of the waist. Still, she could button it up and that’s all that matters.
As the day drew on, she had to ask her friend “why am I wearing these things that make me feel as though my body is being cut into two soft halves? I feel like bread dough that the baker cuts into smaller pieces to make buns, only I can actually feel myself being sliced” In the attempted dexterity at hiding the second half of her belly, which seemed to be screaming out how little progress she was making, and trying at the same time to resist the urge to just unbutton it all and walk around wild and free, she contemplated her life and being. What is all this ?
She imagined the soft fabric of the cheap and cheerful sweatpants she had just bought from Walmart. They were cheap enough to create fabric bubbles where her thighs rubbed against each other, but cheerful in the comfort and flattering profile they managed to provide. She vowed to store the jeans in the bottom of her suitcase, under the bed, just out of the reach of her short arms.
She sat there, hoping no one was noticing her folds, but realising, with horror, that they all probably see her as the fat person that she is. So she gave up with the suffocation and the hiding the unhide-able, and two hours later was eating ice cream so creamy and fatty that the FDA had refused to allow it be sold publicly.
In the tightness of her jeans and the spilling folds of her belly she had forgotten the nineteen times she got out of bed at 5:30am to head to the gym. She did not remember, the times she had spent at the stores, sticking to the “outer aisles” where the produce lies. Those wholesome and tasty recipes, consisting of all the good stuff and none of the manufactured stuff, escaped her mind. She even forgot, that in these same pair of stomach splitting jeans, she had been hurt by the too-tight button and now, the button didn’t leave a dent in her skin, only a division in her stomach. She didn’t notice that win. She wasn’t focused on the fact that she was eating and living well; it did not matter whether or not she was losing weight. She was living a nutritious, active and wholesome life! She could not see any of that, because of the damn jeans.
So, I, personally blame the denim, for refusing to acknowledge Folake’s efforts. And making her feel like the last nineteen days had been a figment of her imagination. I blame Folake, for measuring herself by the gymnastics of her Jean fitting and imagining, that somehow two months of gluttony could vanish in just over a fortnight.
And finally, I blame whatever force in the world that it is, that made Folake so unhappy at her “fat” 57kg, so that she finally had to settle herself at 75kg, only to fall unhappy again.
As it stands, Folake is contemplating the merits of calorie counting And wonders the day on which she will be free of this baggage of bundles of body.
I suspect, that she has the keys to her prison. Only, for some reason, she’s seemed resolute not to use them.
Artist: David Akinola - @artsbydavid