1/27/20 – banana bread

“I think I’ve started wearing life on my hips.” She stood in the dining room and tugged at her shirt, tugged at her sleeves, tugged at the collar.

“Maybe it’s all the banana bread,” he said over the top of the newspaper. Always practical. Steam from his coffee spiraled like a question mark over his head. He never saw her metaphors.

(Although, it was true: She did like banana bread.)

But she had always liked banana bread. “It’s not the banana bread,” she said. “There’s nothing new about my banana bread habit.” She sat in the chair across the table from him, pulled on one boot and then the other. Folded in half like that, her breath caught. Air was not the only thing caught at her sternum. Nothing flowed anymore. It clustered and globbed.

“Menopause is new.” He folded the newspaper until it lay flat on the table. “Women gain weight when they reach menopause.”

She pressed her hands into her belly — soft — uncomfortably so. Her shoulders hunched.

Everything felt heavy. Everything felt full — loaded — and she was under it. It had not felt this way when she was 20. Not when she was 30. Not when she was 40. Only now. It was as if age piled weighty tomes of bullshit on a shelf, higher and higher, until the bulk tipped the whole thing over. She lay beneath the rubble: Buried.

He raised his eyebrows at her, pursed his lips. “I can see you’re being dramatic,” he said. “The face you’re making is the face you make when you are being dramatic.”

The oven timer dinged from the kitchen. The banana bread was ready.