the fat blonde bird.

Thank you Deuce, Alice ana, Christina and Outside in to thin for your lovely comments. As always, I love reading them, I love your thoughts and I deeply appreciate your support. You help me get through the day, you really do.

Recently I've taken up running. I did my first half marathon and let me tell you, I thought I was going to die for the last 6km. I don't know why I did it. The longest I've ever run was 8km and suddenly I was like 22km? Easy! So I stupidly worked out a 22km course and just ran it after work yesterday. Foolish! But it did prove that I can do a hell of a lot more than I think I can. I did run the whole 22km, albeit slowly at times and I finished in 2hr 20mins which is slow, but not as slow as I thought I'd be.

Running is an amazing feeling, I think I'm slightly hooked. I've been running nearly every day now and I can feel myself getting better. Usually it's only 8km a day, which I worked out to be roughly 400cal. Not much! But still, it raises my BMR and it's better than the big fat NOTHING that I used to do. Once I get used to this, I will somehow drag myself out of bed earlier to do boxing or yoga.

But finally, onto the subject matter of this post, the fat blonde bird. I go for my run at around the same time every night, and every night, I run into the fat blonde bird. She walks with her husband/partner/boyfriend and a dog.

I look into the face of the fat blonde bird and I see a Caucasian version of myself. It's easy to see that she was once beautiful. Maybe that's how she got her husband in the first place. We are of similar height, similar bone structure, when I see her, I see me. She is always dressed in a track suit, sometimes with a polar fleece jacket. The sort of outfit that you wear when you've all but given up on life and given up on hoping that there might be something good in this world. Her hair falls just past her shoulders in strange dirty blonde limp strands. Nothing that a quick visit to a hair stylist wouldn't fix. It has no shape, no purpose, it's trying so hard to not try at all. Not a single dime has been spent on that head of hair for the last 5 years, yet it is parted perfectly straight down the middle; a sight that makes me sadder than if it had been a complete mess.

That perfect parting is resonates so much desperation, a woman who hates what she sees in the mirror but somewhere deep inside her, a woman who she used to be is bursting to get out. And it is this woman who makes her pick up the comb and part her hair like that. "Do the best with what you've got honey, it ain't great but we gotta try and salvage something." Words that she'll never speak, words that she might not even know she's thinking, yet the action is automatic and the parting is perfect.

The little rosebud that is her mouth is smothered in bright red lipstick, applied perfectly but unfortunately draws attention to the fact that her cheeks are so fat that her lips can no longer sit properly. They protude outwards, in a permanent little fish pout. Her full face of make up does not go with the old, shabby polar fleece track suits that she always wears. I want to stop my run and say to her, honey, no amount of make up can cover the fat. You know it's there, I know it's there so let's all just stop pretending.

Her body shape is hard to describe. One only has to glance, but it is obvious that she has a shape. She's not one of those people who is rotund naturally. Even at her size, she has a waist, boobs and a butt, all clearly defined. Yet she is expanding so much that these features are all ballooning to the extent that these separate balloons threaten to merge into one big one, upon which she will become rotund. She gives one the impression that she is literally bursting at the seams. Her small frame shouldn't be supporting this sort of size. When I see her, I can feel her skin stretching to accommodate the ever increasing fat cells. The bits of her that stay reasonable the same size (like her knees or wrists) are the last bastions of hope in a body that has gone to the dogs. Bits of skin tagged down so that they can't expand outwards like the rest of her.

And so she strolls, with her husband and dog in complete silence, along the same road that I run down. And she'll look at me, she will sometimes move out of the way to let me pass. She's always got that strange look on her face, and I think that she can see in me what I see in her. We are almost the same person. When I see her the same message always flashes across my mind "run fat bird, run". And it's not a message for her, it's for me. She's like my mirror. I tell myself, look how disgusting you look to other people. Run fat bird, run. How can you be tired when you have that much fat to burn. Burn it off, run fat bird, run. Look how pathetic you are, how drab and frumpy and sad and unattractive. Burn it off, run fat bird, run.