Bellies

by Nicola Dinan

the thoughts I’d long avoided had spilled in, like drops of food coloring into water, green fluid expanding until the ink was all I could see.

“The play’s about how sublimating our true desires for banal conveniences is never sustainable.

maybe the only way to close the gap between who you are and who you pretend to be is to keep pretending.

“Because I put up with it at the time, and people change and people forget and they don’t say sorry,”

But I did want to know, because with Ming all I’d ever done was want to know.

Sometimes this feels bigger than death, you know.”

“There is an urge to deny yourself support,” she says. Check. I know where this is going, and so I decide to cut the shit. “Maybe I don’t think I’m deserving of support.”

“If we think about you after your mother died, crying in the closet. There is a shame there. A shame in being seen, in being helped. Being helped can mean being seen.”

I wonder what’s going on in her head when she looks at me. Probably nonsense. Slay coochie mama queen yes god tongue pop!

There’s an edge of humility to his unjustified confidence, and I find all of this extremely charming. I don’t know why. Patriarchy, I guess!

“I know things change for people, but I don’t want any of it. I don’t think I will.” He twisted his body towards me. “And sometimes it makes me worry a bit, because I think there’s something wrong with me. But when I look into the future, I see fun. Fuck-off holidays,

“But if everyone’s moving on and settling down, I also think, what does that mean for me? I’m going to be left behind, aren’t I? Just, like, this adult playing kid. I get a bit scared when I think about it all. But I like my friends.”

I’d been telling myself to chill out, but realized that I was not, and maybe never would be, a chilled person.

“I’m speaking the shame away. I’m showing you my belly.” “What?” “It’s this analogy we’re using in therapy,” she said. “There’s a lot of fear in showing it, for some animals. Because you’re at risk of being mauled.”

We lay next to each other, his tummy down and mine up,

I was shocked at how quickly I’d capitulated, denying myself what I needed to accept what he wanted. And I knew it was because part of me believed that I was lucky to get what I was given, that there would never be anybody else.

It wasn’t transphobic, but the table fell into deep stillness. A blue, pink and white bear had walked into the room, ready to maul.

Some memories harden into land mines. I don’t know where the pressure points are.

They’re little things that fill the day, things that become special because you do them with someone you love.”

“But I’ve been thinking about how the trunks of trees bend and curve when they grow next to each other. Their leaves twist to accommodate each other. Their closeness reads on the shape of them, and you can infer the shape of one from the shape of another. When you know someone and you grow together, your shape and form become theirs. And so even though Rob is gone, and there’ll never be another Rob, another friend I’ve known as well or as closely, the impression his life left on me will always be there, and in that sense we haven’t lost him at all.”

Maybe that’s what people are supposed to do, sponge out the bad, wring out the suffering as much as we can, even if it stains our hearts and hands.