I've bought the same jeans in four sizes

The order history loaded newest first, and I scrolled down looking for my size before I remembered I didn't know which one that was anymore.

Same jeans. Dark wash, straight leg, a copper button with a little star stamped into it. I've been buying them since I was twenty-nine. The app shows every order with a thumbnail, and the thumbnails are identical, so the only thing that changes as you scroll is the small gray number underneath. 14. 16. 12. 10. 14. 16. 12.

It read like a heart monitor.

I was sitting in my car in the school parking lot during my free period, eating almonds out of a sandwich bag, trying to replace a pair that had finally split at the inner thigh. I teach middle-school art. I spend my days telling eleven-year-olds that glue sticks are not a snack and that every self-portrait is allowed to have three eyes, and I love it, and I don't panic easily. But I sat there with my thumb on the screen and felt my whole face go hot, because my phone had just done something nobody in my life had ever been rude enough to do. It had lined my attempts up in a row.

The closet

At home, the jeans are not in a row. They're spread out on purpose.

The 10s are in a vacuum bag on the top shelf, behind the Christmas wrapping paper. I bought them the summer I was thirty-one, when I ran three mornings a week and ate the same chicken salad for a hundred lunches straight. The 12s hang in the back with the dresses. The 14s are in the laundry rotation. The 16s are folded in the bottom drawer under my husband's old softball T-shirts, which is where I put things I'm not ready to look at.

Julian does the laundry in our house because he says I fold like I'm mad at the shirt. He has never once said a word about the sizes. He just knows. He puts each pair in its place without checking the tag, which I used to find sweet, and which that afternoon in the parking lot I found almost unbearable. My husband could sort my last decade by feel.

Every restart had the same choreography. A Monday. A new app. A photo of the scale I didn't show anyone. And a big, triumphant donation bag for the larger sizes, because I'd decided you're supposed to burn the bridge behind you. Then, eight months or a year later, a quiet order for the size I'd given away, delivered in a gray mailer that I'd carry in from the porch before Julian got home.

That's why there are four. I kept rebuying the bridge.

The size I didn't order

I didn't order anything that day. I closed the app, went back inside, and ran sectionals with the clarinets, who were rushing the same measure they always rush. I told them what I tell them every week. The fast part isn't hard because it's fast. It's hard because you get excited and stop listening to the people around you.

I heard myself say it and thought, well, that's annoying.

Every attempt in that order history had been fast, and every one had been done alone and in secret, like the gray mailers. So the next week I did two unexciting things. I booked an appointment with my doctor that was actually about my weight, instead of an appointment about a sinus infection where I brought up my weight at the very end, in the doorway, with my coat already on. And I told Julian all of it, including the parking lot, including the heart monitor.

He listened. Then he said, "So no donation bag this time."

"No bag," I said.

That mattered more than I expected. The jeans stayed where they were. Nothing got thrown out and nothing got announced, and with no bridge burned there was nothing to rebuy if I had a bad month. I had bad months. My doctor and I worked out a plan we researched together, slowly, with labs and follow-ups and a lot of conversations about sleep that irritated me at the time. I walked the track behind the school after the last bell while the cross-country kids lapped me and pretended not to. I stopped eating lunch out of a sandwich bag in my car.

It was slower than any attempt in the order history. It was also the first one I didn't hide.

Some people get there with a spreadsheet and a very patient doctor. I got there with a closet I was finally allowed to open all the way.

Laundry day

About a year in, I noticed the 14s had moved to the back with the dresses and the 12s were in the rotation, and I hadn't been the one to move them.

I haven't taken the 10s down from the top shelf. They're still behind the wrapping paper. Maybe I'll wear them someday and maybe I won't, and for the first time either answer seems fine.

Last Sunday I was grading playing tests on the bed while Julian folded next to me. He held up a pair of dark-wash jeans, copper button, little star, and asked where I wanted them.

I looked. I didn't check the tag.

"Those are just my jeans," I said, and he set them on my side of the dresser with the rest.