Today I am thinking that to be fat is to retain a vexing relationship with the number zero. This thought arrives with an egg in my hand. I am preparing an omelette and contemplating the mathematical representation of nothing, which at certain angles resembles the contour of the egg I am about to crack. There isn’t much a fat guy can do to flatter his figure. It’s more a case of damage control the GQ article I read in high school advised. The lifeless yellow yolk plops into the ceramic whipping bowl. Syrupy albumen chases it down as if to ask permission. Once, when I was trying on a suit for my grandfather’s funeral, a tailor informed me that strapping a belt around a very wide waist is like tying a string around the bottom of an egg. When I heard this, I imagined a crimson thread pulled taut over an egg’s equator. Did you know that the widest part of an eggshell is called the equator? It is something I almost want to announce on the street—that this little zero I once cradled in my palm had a geography, was itself a sort of world. The reason I was asking the tailor about belts is because they hurt. Pain is an occasion to question. The leather eats into the soft skin under my stomach leaving a raw red line around my hips. The GQ writer recommends fat men wear suspenders instead, which allow the waist of the trousers to remain near the physical equator, whereas with a belt they would slip down to the Tropic of Capricorn. In other words, my red line was not where it should have been. I was a globe off kilter, mismarked. No one could navigate me. I cinched my belt tighter and tighter, determined to control unsightly plumber’s butt. My imagined egg began to splinter under the constriction of its red thread. First appeared small cracks, then gushing fluid, a tiny nothing world spilling everything out. It wasn’t fertile anyway. Sometimes I feel angry at the resilience of flesh, the way it doesn’t crack but instead bruises, then heals. Sometimes I feel angry at the resilience of my flesh, how my attempts to reduce it to zero, to realign its equator in its natural spot, failed. I was not very close with my grandfather. When he passed, I felt a brief burst of sadness and then almost nothing; my emotions quickly approached a limit of zero. Sitting in the narrow pew during his service, the only thing I remember feeling is the belt of my suit cutting into my groin. It was a frightening kind of pain, the kind that signals a loss of some capacity—perhaps, I thought, my fertility. I let the pain enter me like a host admitting a familiar spirit. The empty words of the priest vanished. I could not consider death while this pain-spirit animated me so. But even filled with that animating pain, I dared not make a sound. I produced exactly zero decibels of noise, the precise volume of fat agony. Sometimes I do wonder if I spend too much time looking down. Down at my waistline, down at the feet I cannot see for my belly, down at the scale that still does not read zero pounds. What would happen if I were to look up? Further exhorting the merits of suspenders, the GQ writer invites fat men to let your pants hang loose from your shoulders while reconsidering your physique. The exact etymology of the verb “consider” is unknown. It comes from “to observe,” possibly in the astronomical sense. You see, sider may be related to star. Perhaps if I looked up, not down, I would observe stars, a thousand thousand distant twinkling yolks—conflagrations, brilliant zeroes. The kind of zero I would like to reach for, pilot by. Who needs an equator with all this sky.

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T.C. Martin is a nonfiction writer and poet from southern Maryland. His work has appeared in Soft Punk Mag, Longleaf Review, Poets.org, and Roxane Gay’s The Audacity newsletter. He lives and teaches in Pittsburgh.

Photograph by Sherry Shahan