Despite gravity

At 16, I sat in my aunt’s beauty shop window, and watched a woman walk down the street.

This woman struggled against her own body, weighed down by herself. She was loose

skin and rolls. Her chest clung to her stomach. Her stomach fell

below her waist. Her thighs draped around her knees. Her body was massive,

but I watched her move it. I watched her carry her own weight and struggle, with each step,

to lift her leg. Her fat jiggled with each pump of the arm, each reach of the leg.

She pumped again. Everything pushed her to stop, to stay,

to never move again, yet she was, with all her might,

fighting to make it to the corner. “She’s out there again,” my cousin said and stood

in the shop’s doorway. She struck a match, lit up, and tilted the Marlboro in her hand out the crack of the door.

My aunt looked out the window. I could see her in the mirror, rolling wet hair into curlers.

Her eyes narrowed and her lip curled as she squirted blue and purple rods in my mother’s short black hair.

Her eyes met mine in the mirror. “Never get that big,” she said.

The woman made it to the corner. I watched her chest

rise and fall. She pushed her shoulders back, turned,

and started again a woman still moving despite her body.