Baby Fat

Occasionally, a picture of my younger self rudely interrupts my daily hubbub of late adolescence and I always notice, first and foremost, just how much baby fat I had.

It’s weird, the way you shrink and shrivel away over time without noticing any loss at all.

The way crossing a road without my big sister's hand seemed like a death sentence,

And now I’m the driver giving way to the clueless kids riding obnoxious bikes.

The way I used to watch painted women perfumed with magick walk past with their swaying hips like a pendulum, but with attitude, in catatonic awe

And now makeup and a healthy spritz of gucci bloom is simply an unmissable event of the mundane morning routine.

The way $20 used to be pocket money for the month, and so eagerly received,

And now is (almost) an hour's worth of bored work.

I notice, when the past visits, I notice how much my baby fat has melted away.

Some of it still remains.

I watch my Self from last week pout with a prematurely wrinkled forehead and father-like furrowed brows, complaining about how she did not consent to be born! She did not herself pick out this body nor these people nor these happenings.

She had absolutely no say!

And I wish I could grip her semi-fat cheeks and ask,

‘Is that not the way in which every gift is given?’

And god I can’t stop thinking about how my minimum-wage backed balayage looks orange and troll-like in some lighting no matter how much I use blue shampoo and,

How I accidentally threw an airpod into the washing machine and now I have to save up for a month and a half to get a new pair or

That unbearably, sitting-on-one's-hands awkward kiss from that weird messy night or,

The fact that my 10-year plan that I crafted with great vigour and pride at 15

now means absolutely nothing.

And I can only imagine the way me from next week, or next month or in 3-kids-time wishes to grab my relatively fat cheeks of today in a gentle grip and reprimand me with the relieved smile about how little it all matters.

I watch as my baby fat begins to migrate.

From tubby arms and alarmingly disproportionate cheeks to

Rounded breasts and,

Fuller hips and,

Padding on my lower belly.

I occasionally catch myself in an astral-projecting, out-of-body kind of way, gazing outside of my friends’ cars’ window, as we both scream a song that will act as a landmark for a specific moment of our shared youth,

And I always promise to remember all the details of that night,

What we ate, or our outfits, what cute boys we spotted, what horrid boys we discussed, what life crisis was trending then.

But all I ever can remember is the way the barely-passed-the-test driver smiled back at me as we spotted a yellow car and the way warm orange street light bent and bowed through the raindrops that were busy star-baking on the windscreen as though each molecule of water was a refraction prism and the odd mix of feelings warring in my gut of contentment at the perfectness of the moment against the jolting fear of missing curfew.

I often wonder why I’m still such a child.

Why I’m still so sensitive and,

clueless and,

so embarrassingly naive.

Why I still can’t drive or

I’m still a virgin or

I don’t understand how my superannuation works at all.

Or why I still have so much baby fat.

But we all really should appreciate our baby fat whilst we have it.

Because one day, sooner than you shrug off as possible,

It will just be fat.