The Day I Signed Away a Year of Confinement to Lose Weight

My name is Mariela, I’m thirty-seven years old, and all my life people have looked at me twice. The first time with curiosity, the second with pity. I’m five foot four, I weigh two hundred and sixty pounds, and as long as I can remember, my body has been a hostile country I learned to inhabit by force of habit. I have black hair down to my waist and eyes so dark a brown they seem bottomless. That’s what I remember when I look in the mirror: my eyes. The rest I try not to remember.

Sebastián, my husband, loves me in a way I still can’t understand. We’ve been together for twelve years and not once, not a single time, have I heard him complain about the way I look. Tobías, our eight-year-old son, hugs my belly like it’s a pillow and tells me I smell like home. They are the only thing keeping the slack rope I walk every day from snapping. And yet no one else’s love is enough to cover up the mirror I carry inside me.

Sebastián fucks me twice a week, always with the lights off, always because I turn them off. He takes me from behind, grabs my enormous tits from underneath, and buries his cock in my cunt as if he were afraid of breaking me. He has a thick cock, curving upward, and when he comes inside me he squeezes my hips and tells me in my ear that I’m beautiful. I close my eyes and clench my cunt around his cock, sucking him dry of every last drop of semen, and I swallow the word beautiful as if it were a kind lie. Afterward, when he falls asleep, I wipe myself between my thighs with the edge of the sheet and stay awake feeling his load seeping out of my cunt. That’s my marriage: a cock that loves me and a cunt that doesn’t believe it deserves that cock.

That March morning I dropped Tobías off at school and walked back along a street I knew by heart. Sebastián was at the office, the house was waiting empty for me, and I carried my routine like a backpack full of stones. I turned the corner by the newsstand and saw it: a new poster, pasted onto a pole, with red letters on a black background. Vértice Body Reconstruction Center. If everything else has failed, we haven’t. Below it, a phone number and a simple promise: “Guaranteed results in twelve months.”

I took out my cellphone and dialed before thinking. A woman’s voice answered on the second ring.

—Vértice Center, Carolina speaking. How can I help you?

—Hello —I said, and my throat closed up. I swallowed—. I saw your poster. I… I’ve tried everything. Diets, pills, surgeons. Nothing works and I don’t know what else…

—Breathe, Mariela —she cut in gently.

—How do you know my name?

—Caller ID —she replied without a hint of surprise—. And don’t be alarmed by what I’m about to tell you. At Vértice we don’t use conventional methods. We work with extreme discipline. We take practices inspired by dynamics of dominance and submission, adapt them to a physical program, and apply them in a controlled environment.

BDSM, I thought. But I didn’t say anything. Carolina went on.

—It’s a twelve-month program on a closed rural property. Once you sign in, there’s no leaving until you complete the cycle. No visits. Only weekly video calls with your family. Would you like me to send you the material so you can review it?

I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me. I said yes in a low voice and hung up with trembling hands. Ten minutes later, a message from an unknown number brought me a link to a shared folder. I sat down at the kitchen table, still wearing my coat, and opened the first video.

A woman, no more than thirty, was running on an incline treadmill. Cords with weights hung from her body, attached in places I didn’t want to look at twice. Her back was scored with red marks, still fresh. She was naked from the waist up and her tits bounced against her chest with each stride, marked by two metal clamps squeezing her nipples, from which small lead weights dangled and jerked violently. Lower down, between her legs, a thick rope sank into the lips of her cunt and came out her ass, tied at the waist, and every step made her teeth grind. While she ran, someone out of frame gave her instructions in a firm tone, never raising their voice. She didn’t cry. She clenched her teeth and kept going. The video lasted seven minutes. She never stopped once.

I opened the second. A woman strapped upright to a metal frame, arms spread in a cross. A trainer applied electrodes to her thighs, her abdomen, and her nipples, and a larger one was taped directly over her clit. She was told to count to one hundred without making a mistake. Every time her voice faltered, a shock shot through her body, arched her back, and tore a short howl from her mouth, and she started again from the last correct number. I counted along with her. She made it to sixty-three. At minute six she started dripping between her thighs, a bright thread running down the insides of her legs to her knees, and the trainer, with the same flat voice, told her: “your cunt is giving you away, keep counting.” The woman kept counting and kept dripping.

The third video was different. The same woman from the first, now standing in front of a full-length mirror, wearing fitted athletic clothes. She was unrecognizable. She was smiling. Her chin was lifted. Behind her, a camera slowly rotated, revealing a body that looked sculpted by fury and patience working together. The date in the corner of the video said eleven months and two weeks after the first one.

I closed the laptop. I sat staring at the wood of the table, the same wood I’d known since we moved into this house. My stomach was in knots and, at the same time, my hands were tingling. Between my legs was tingling too, I can’t deny it: a small, dark pulse I didn’t know whether to call fear or something worse. I slipped my hand under my pants, under my panties, and touched myself. I was wet. My cunt was soaking from having seen those women trained like beasts. I pulled my shiny fingers back and looked at them as if they weren’t mine. I want it, I thought. I want to be her. I want to be the woman in the last video. And right away: what kind of person am I if I want this? What kind of cunt gets wet for this?

That night, while Tobías slept clutching a stuffed animal that smelled like apple shampoo, I lifted my unfinished plate and looked at Sebastián from across the table.

—I found a clinic.

He looked up. Waited.

—It’s… different. Very intense. They promise results, but there are conditions.

—I’m listening.

—A full year inpatient. No visits. One video call a week. And once I go in, I can’t leave until it’s over.

Sebastián set the fork down on the table. He said nothing for a long while. Then he ran both hands over his face and kept his eyes closed for a few seconds.

—A year? Without seeing each other?

—Video calls, Fede.

—That’s not seeing each other —he said, sounding tired, not angry—. And Tobías? He’s eight. He needs you.

—I know. I know and it breaks my heart. But I also need to be able to look in the mirror without wanting to smash it.

I showed him the videos. Not all three. Just the last one, the “after” clip. I couldn’t bring myself to show him the first or the second. Sebastián looked at the screen, then at me. Then back at the screen.

—What do they do there, Mariela? How do they achieve that?

—Extreme methods —I said—. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s hard. It’s physical, it’s discipline, it’s… —I couldn’t find the right word and fell silent.

Sebastián stood up and went to the window. He stayed there, with his back to me, for a long time. The street was empty. All you could hear was the refrigerator’s hum and, far off, the intermittent barking of a dog. When he turned around, his eyes were red but dry.

—I don’t like it —he said—. I don’t like it at all. But I’ve known you for twelve years and I’ve never seen you look at something like that. If this is going to give you back what you lost as a girl, I’ll bear it. Tobías and I will wait for you. But promise me one thing.

—Anything.

—That you’ll come back. That they won’t break you into pieces. That you’ll come back whole.

—I’ll come back —I said, and in that moment I believed it was true.

That night, after putting Tobías to bed, Sebastián took me to the bedroom and locked the door, something he almost never did. He turned on the small lamp, not the overhead light. He took off my T-shirt carefully, then my bra, and my tits fell heavy against my belly. He knelt on the rug and pulled down my pants and panties together, then buried his face between my thighs as if he were hungry. I spread my legs and held on to the edge of the bed.

—Sebas, the light —I murmured, out of habit.

—Leave it —he said, and sucked my clit into his mouth all at once.

He licked me slowly, with his tongue wide and flat, starting at the entrance to my cunt and going up to my clit and back down again. He slid his tongue inside me and then two fingers, curling them upward until he found that spot that made me bite my lip not to scream. He sucked harder, closing his mouth around my clit, and with his fingers he fucked me slowly, pulling out and pushing in, while I grabbed his hair with both hands and shoved his face against my cunt. I came in his mouth in less than five minutes, with a long shudder that climbed from my feet to the nape of my neck, and he kept sucking me until I asked him to stop because I couldn’t take any more.

He threw me onto the bed on my back, yanked off his pants and boxers in one motion, and lay down on top of me. His cock was hard, red, the tip shining, and he rubbed it between my soaked cunt lips before pushing it in. He entered with one thrust, all the way to the hilt, and took my breath away.

—A year —he said against my mouth—. A year without this. Look at me.

I looked at him. He drove into me slowly, with his whole cock, pulling almost all the way out and sinking back in to the balls. He grabbed my tits, one in each hand, squeezed my nipples between his fingers, and lowered his mouth to suck them, one and then the other, while he kept fucking me with a slow, deep rhythm. Then he turned me over. Put me on all fours, grabbed my wide hips, and shoved his cock into me from behind, burying it until I felt his balls slap my clit. He pulled it out and rammed it back in, each time faster, each time harder, and I buried my face in the pillow and pushed my ass back against his pelvis, asking for more, asking him to break me open.

—Harder —I told him, and I didn’t recognize my own voice—. Fuck me harder, Sebas. Like it’s the last time.

He took hold of my ass cheeks with both hands, spread them apart, and started fucking me with all the force he had. The bed creaked. I moaned into the pillow, mouth open, drooling. He shoved his thumb into my ass while he kept fucking my cunt and I came again, clamping down on his cock, sucking it with the walls of my cunt until he let out a growl and came, and I felt the hot stream of semen filling me inside, pulse after pulse. He stayed there, sunk to the hilt, and pressed my back against his chest.

—Come back —he whispered in my ear—. Come back however you can, but come back.

The load leaked down the insides of my thighs when he pulled his cock out. I lay face down, breathing into the pillow, while he ran his hand over my back. We didn’t say anything else.

The following week was one gentle lie after another. I told Tobías I was going to a camp for tired moms. I told him I’d learn to cook better, sleep better, be happy when it rained. He asked if he could come visit me and I lied again. I told him it was a place far away, in the country, and that when I came back the three of us were going to travel together wherever he chose. He chose the beach. A beach with big seashells.

On the day I left, Tobías hugged my belly as always, but this time he took longer to let go. Sebastián kissed me on the forehead and whispered something in my ear that I’m not going to repeat, because it’s mine. I got into the clinic’s car, a black SUV with tinted windows, and watched through the glass as they shrank on the sidewalk. Tobías raised his hand. He kept it raised until the SUV turned the corner.

The trip took four hours. We crossed roads I didn’t know, towns growing smaller and smaller, then open countryside. When we arrived at Vértice, the sun was setting. The property was surrounded by a tall fence, the kind used in the country, but with a detail that wasn’t country at all: cameras on every post, each one blinking red. An electric gate opened without anyone touching anything. Inside, a gravel road led to a long, low, whitewashed building with small windows and an iron door.

Carolina was waiting at the door. She was taller than her voice suggested, wiry as a length of wire, dressed in black from head to toe. She smiled, but the smile ended before her eyes did.

—Welcome, Mariela. Your transformation begins.

She gave me a tour of the place before showing me where I would sleep. We started with the gym. It was huge. Treadmills with hooks at waist height, metal frames with pulleys and ropes, an entire wall covered with instruments I didn’t want to name in my head: rods, crops, what looked like belts with heavy buckles, coiled cables hanging from hooks, harnesses with metal rings sewn at crotch level, clamps of different sizes lined up by weight. Everything clean, everything in its place, organized with the neatness of an operating room.

—You’ll spend many hours here —Carolina said, not looking at me—. You’ll learn to respect the rhythm.

Then came the mirror room. Three walls covered from floor to ceiling with mirrors, white lighting, cold, shadowless. In the center, a circle painted on the floor. I asked what happened there. Carolina said:

—You look at yourself. Naked. Until you stop lying to yourself. And when you stop lying to yourself, you touch yourself in front of the mirror, looking into your own eyes, until you learn to come without lowering your gaze. Most women take weeks.

I felt heat rise to my face. She kept walking.

The dining room looked like a laboratory. Stainless steel tables, trays divided into compartments the exact size of a portion. There were no smells. No noise. A woman in a white uniform was washing something in the kitchen with her head down. She didn’t look at me when we passed.

We went through a corridor with closed doors. Each door had a numeric keypad. Carolina pointed to one and said, in the same tone used to name the dining room:

—Correction room.

—What happens there? —I asked.

—Whatever is necessary.

I didn’t push it. Something in the way she refused to look at me told me questions weren’t welcome yet.

My room was a cell. I don’t want to use any other word because it would be false. Four white walls, a metal bed with a taut sheet, an empty desk, a wardrobe with a magnetic lock, a window the size of a notebook with thick bars. No clock. No mirror. No books. No phone.

—Rest —Carolina said from the doorway—. Tomorrow at five we start. A bell will wake you. Don’t turn it off. It can’t be turned off.

She closed the door. The electronic bolt clicked sharply and then there was another, deeper sound, as if a second lock had dropped from the inside. I sat on the edge of the bed. The sheet was white and smelled of disinfectant. I didn’t dare touch it with my hands.

The images from the videos came rushing back. The electrodes stuck to nipples and clits, the ropes sunk into cunts, the weights hanging from tits, the bright thread running down the thighs of that bound woman. And between them, in the middle, the sentence Carolina had repeated over the phone: once you sign in, there’s no leaving. I had signed four hours ago, at a long table, with a black pen that didn’t tremble. Four pages. The last one with a fingerprint, my right thumb pressed against a blue ink pad that later wouldn’t wash off completely.

I touched my stained thumb. I thought of Tobías. I thought of Sebastián and the hot load I could still feel warm at the edge of memory, as if it were something that had happened a little while ago and not the night before. I thought of the woman in the third video, her lifted chin, her ending smile. I thought of myself, in this bed, six months from now. Twelve months from now. I thought about whether the woman who would walk out that door next year would still be me, and how many times my cunt would have to learn to get wet from fear before learning to get wet for something else.

I lay down fully dressed, my shoes on the floor. I turned off the light from a switch beside the bed. The darkness was complete, with not a single point of light. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe slowly, like a physiotherapist had taught me years ago, when I still believed the body could be fixed with patience.

The bell would ring at five. Six hours left. Twelve months ahead. Three hundred and sixty-five dawns like this one. I fell asleep thinking about the blue imprint of my thumb and whether, when it was all over, I would still be able to call this body mine.