Bellies

by Nicola Dinan

The most he did out of the house was shovel food onto my plate, affection buried in soup and grain.

People I once thought were cool applied for jobs at places like Goldman Wank and PricewaterhouseShitheads.

BRUH😭

“I feel like I’ve been drawing an outline of myself using negative space,”

She suggests Saving Face, but I let her know it’s already a movie.

YAS saving face mention

“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.”

dog motif

nodded slowly. “Our insides aren’t worth much to other people, I guess.” “Some people,” she said. “It sounds like hippie bullshit, but I think the risk is worth it. It’s how you learn who cares, and it stops you from punishing yourself so much for being you.”

“I have a bad habit of going along with things that aren’t right for me, and I’m just trying to do the things a person would do if they loved themselves as much as they loved other people, I guess.”

this made me stare at my kindle for 5 minutes in blank silence and then i started crying

“You think you’re some fucking Sally Rooney, do you?”

again BRUH😭

“The times I thought you loved me most were when I thought you needed me most,” he says. “It’s like I don’t know the difference between someone needing me and me loving them.”

dare i say it… dog metaphor

“I don’t know what replaces that feeling of home.”

“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.”

so much crying being done

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.

It’s time for us to say goodbye, but neither of us does it. “You’re smiling,” he says. I am confused for a moment, and then I understand. “I’m smiling. You’re smiling.” “I’m smiling.”

PERFECT