I stand frozen, listening to his footsteps echo down the corridor. As soon as the entrance door of my apartment building closes, I find myself sinking into the couch. I stare blankly into space.

So this is what it feels like to be dumped. Well, I have been dumped before, but never by someone I’ve been with for so long, and not for another woman.

To my surprise there is more anger than heartbreak pulsing through my veins. Maybe the sadness will come later, but for now, all I can feel is a deep sense of betrayal. I trusted him. I thought we were both society’s rejects who had found each other. Nobody wanted me and nobody wanted him and we had found a way to be good together. We once talked about making children. That was the first time I agreed to do it with him without a condom. I frown. Was he manipulating me even then? Because he never spoke about kids again after that.

God, how much time I’ve wasted on him.

My mind drifts back to when we first met. I was fresh out of college and had just started the internship that would one day become my full-time job. I was so confident, so passionate, so ambitious, and then I ran into this guy who had seemed so perfect for me. I was in advertising, he was in marketing. I actually saw us as a power couple. What a laugh. Thinking back now, I can see clearly that we were only a perfect couple for the first few months. After that all those subtle comments started. About my looks in general, my unfeminine laugh, but mostly my weight. All the little jokes. Once when we were going on vacation, he joked with the airline staff to seat someone equally heavy on the other side of the plane so that I didn’t tilt the plane, and make it fly lopsided.

Slowly, with every strike he chiseled away at my confidence. Over time I no longer felt like a full-blown raging fire, I hated it, but I was slowly but surely being turned down to a fickle flame of my former self. I can still remember how it felt to be so full of light and energy, even if I can’t muster up a drop of it for myself at this very moment.

I sit forward.

No, I’m not going to sit here feeling sorry for myself, and hope that somehow my life is going to get itself back on track. I’ll do something about this. It’s scary as hell, looking out on a life you never thought you’d face, but I can handle it. I can be single again. Maybe the lap dancer did me a favour when she went down on him.

I force myself to my feet and sway with the strong emotions running through my body.

Ignoring the voice in my head that seems intent on repeating the cruel words, specifically, about how much lighter his new girlfriend is than me, I begin to pace the floor of my apartment. I try to focus my mind on one thing at a time.

But those negative words nag at the back of my head. I have to address them.

What did I expect? I was making him feeling guilty and he needed an excuse. Attack is the best form of defense, and he knew exactly where to stick the knife to make sure that I’d bleed for hours afterwards. My weight is a sore point for me.

I’ve always been a buxom gal, but while I was with him I just couldn’t stop the weight from piling on. To be fair it was partly his fault. I’d always stopped eating before seven, but he liked to eat late so he would often order fried chicken, or pizza late at night. He would have a couple of pieces, then he would force me to finish it, because he would make me feel as if wasting the food would somehow impact the starving children in Africa.

But now that I think about it. He was funny about my weight even when we first got together and I was still full of lovely curves, he never really paid me any compliments, or was positive about the way I looked. He preferred to make love with the lights off and it would often feel like he was trying to touch as little of my body as possible. The sex wasn’t awful at the start, when the two of us were still getting to know each other, our likes and dislikes, but in the last six months it’s been terrible.

I tried everything I could to switch things up, doing whatever I could in the vain hope that it might turn him on or get him to do more than roll on top of me, thrust for a few minutes, and then roll off. Oh, and of course he always loved his blowjobs. Those he had as regular as clockwork. Three sometimes four times a week. To the point, I felt that was all I was good for.

Filling my belly with his slightly bitter cum.

He would lay there with his eyes shut, groaning, “oh baby yes, yes, just like that,” while I worked on him. I tried to pretend he was encouraging me, but I knew in my heart he was imagining some other woman. A woman he was actually attracted to. A thinner, sexier woman. One of those women I had caught him looking at. Women who weren’t anything like me.

I guess even that should have been enough, over the last two years, to completely crush my self-esteem. I look down at my body now, in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and run my hands over it. I don’t like what I feel. The lumps and bumps. They were not there before I started eating his leftover pizzas and chicken.

I know I want to change, to forge a new life for myself. But his words are still ringing in my ears, along with every barbed comment he’s made to me about the way I look. The comparisons to his friend’s girlfriends, leaving pictures of slim, toned women on his computer, buying me clothes a few sizes too small for my birthday because he wanted to give me something to work towards.

But I can do this for myself.

That’s what I have to keep reminding myself. If I want, I can lose this weight and get in shape. I know my thighs will never touch unless I starve myself, but I don’t actually want that. I just want to be a size where I can be happy and feel beautiful.

I’ll start again. I’ll go out there and just be me for a while. Eat when I want to, have great sex with a man who actually thinks I’m attractive, and control my own television’s remote. It’ll be great not to be putting down the toilet seat every time I want to pee and cleaning urine off the floor every damn day. I won’t have to hear his relentless disapproving voice every single time I do anything that he doesn’t like, and quite frankly, that has become almost everything I do. God, the other day, he was complaining about the way I breathe. I can just do one load of washing a week instead of three. I won’t have to suck his small cock again.

Yes, enough of being a doormat.

As I pace up and down the apartment, a smile forms on my face. I don’t want to do this for revenge. I don’t want to do this for him. No, in fact, if he had been a little kinder to me about all of this over the course of our relationship maybe I’d have been more inclined to do something about it before now. I stop pacing suddenly. I never thought about it before, but every time I so much as hinted that I was thinking about losing weight, he did everything in his power to covertly and subtly sabotage me. He brought sweets into the house, he ordered even more take-out at night and he made plans for us to go out for dinner when he knew I was planning on hitting the gym. Or he would suddenly want to cuddle on the couch with a movie.

So, I’m not going to do this to spite him. I’m going to do this in spite of him. Not because I want him back, or because I want him to regret his decision. No, I can’t imagine any time soon where I’d want James back in my life. Candy is welcome to him. I just want to be happy with my body again, to prove to myself that the driven, passionate woman who had existed before James smothered her in fat is still buried inside me somewhere.

I’ll start tonight. Right now.