Bellies

by Nicola Dinan

People didn’t ask about this stuff enough. Nobody wants to admit that people leave the closet but not the room.

I laughed. I was doing a lot of laughing. The edges of my lips and the bottom of my cheeks felt strained. Stop laughing so much. Say something interesting. Nothing came to mind.

“How do you fix it?” I asked.

Doesnt undedstand that mental health is about coping and growing

She gagged a couple more times after I shut my eyes. The sound looped in the back of my brain. I thought unfair thoughts.

Ming would sometimes ration out information about his mother, tiny parcels of detail and memory.

The death of his mother had become a star from which he mapped other things.

When I was at school, nobody, including me, wanted to change next to the boy everyone thought was gay. And so I breathed in the suspicion that hung in the changing-room air, alongside the smell of chlorine and sweat and cans of Lynx Africa, and it clung to my insides like lead.

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

Sometimes people just have to be there. It was so easy to get wrapped up in comparing myself to him, feeling small next to him. If Ming is this, then what am I? What do I offer? Maybe it’s enough for me to be here.

Sometimes understanding Ming felt like treading water, and sometimes I was ashamed for not knowing its depth.

And then I thought again about all the things I didn’t know. Three months to learn about his OCD. Four months to learn his name. Eight months to think of him as sad. Things that forced me to acknowledge there was a gap in the completeness I wanted between Ming and me. Maybe we stood at either end of a rift, two bluffs separated by the things I didn’t know. Experts know how little they know. That’s what Dad liked to say. Still, not knowing could be painful.

Sometimes a person, an achievement or a place—whatever is missing—seems the perfect shape to fill a void, so much so that its absence seems to be the cause of the problem and its presence the solution. But up close, the voids are always much larger.

We stared at each other for a moment too long. I met his tentative smile with my own, and within each smile was a lie. His, but also mine, the one that said I believed him.

I seemed to know that he was going to weave the months of nothings into something, to close that distance between us. I was coming into knowledge, the tips of my toes on the edge of a plane. Did I want to know? Both states of knowing and unknowing could be torture. But I did want to know, because with Ming all I’d ever done was want to know.

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

“I think I’ve realized that even if I did everything on the list, life would only be tolerable.”

I don’t know if I should be honest. I know what it’ll give him if I say I’ve thought about it, that everyone thinks about it, that everyone worries they’re not doing the right thing. Everyone has to accept that they might not be. I’m taking each day as it comes, but as far as I know, this is what I want. It’s what I want. I don’t need to carry the burden of other people’s doubt.

Being gender nonconforming comes with so much doubt and questioning. Being questioned like this by a partnerd is so disheartening.

“It wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” he says with his back to me. “If it’s what you wanted, I guess. It must be nice to know you have the option.” Nice for fucking whom? I wonder how a therapist raised someone with so little self-awareness. This sucks. The dynamic in which I owe him, the dynamic in which I shut up about what I want.

I tell her that I’m a burden. I tell her that in his eyes I’m on a warpath to destroy my own body, that I’m a freak, a hormonal griffin.

There’s no Ming’s Journey in our relationship. Tom has strapped himself onto a plane with a faulty engine, and it’s not interesting because the plane has yet to crash.

There’s a tipping point that comes on nights like these. Where I go from feeling hot to seeing stubble that isn’t there, and to inspecting the hair on women’s upper lips to see if the amount I have left is natural. I see the angle of my cheeks and size of my jaw. I see the width of my shoulders. The hormones could dissolve the muscles around them, but they’ll never shave bone. I wonder if they’re really that wide, and whether drugs distort or purify. I wonder what I actually look like and who the fuck can tell me. It feels like when I used to look in the mirror when I was younger, when I would push and prod at my face and question whether I was real.

Poor fucking Tom. Stupid fucking Tom. It’d all be a good play, wouldn’t it.

It had been in that moment with Ming, some months before, that all the small stuff had weighed up to something insurmountably large. Larger than it had felt when she’d told me she was trans, because the threads of transness had danced into something that was no longer a hypothetical scary, but a big and present and undeniable thing. It was there in front of me, on her naked body and on her painted and scalpeled face. And then I couldn’t keep it up, and so my dick seemed to measure the distance between the new Ming and the old Ming. And still, I didn’t leave.

Maybe I’d known that some end was inevitable, but when a person loves another, they don’t leave, and when a person is sick, the other doesn’t leave, and when Ming stopped being sick and wanted to change in ways that were painful and alien, I stayed because she needed it. And I wasn’t ready to be alone, and so the breakup was a betrayal, and Thin Frames was a spit in the face of the years I’d spent holding her shaking hand. It was a looting of privacy, pulling me inside out and shaking me for coins.

I felt embarrassed, and wondered if the me from two years ago would balk at me now, or if I’d always said shit like this and people just let it slide. I had a narrow field of vision. That’s how Ming would’ve described it. Maybe that’d always been my problem, thinking too small.

It’s important to remember, Tom, that accepting responsibility doesn’t mean accepting blame, and that you can take charge of your own life without it being an admission of guilt or fault. My decisions were my own. There was nobody else to claim them.

All the cursing and bitching and the hate inside my head came easiest, but it was all just pirouettes on the same big toe, moving fast but going nowhere. Maybe I have to stop hating Ming if I want to stop thinking about her, and maybe part of that means taking blame out of the picture altogether. It was so basic, so fucking obvious, and yet so impossibly hard.

I know that beauty isn’t supposed to mean all that much, but sometimes it means a lot.

It might’ve been a pathetic, fishing question, but I ached for emotional symmetry, to be reassured of my worth, that there was good attached to me and to time spent on me.

“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.” I 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 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.

I prefer hot to beautiful. Beautiful is sad. It reminds me of the way Tom said it, and how that changed after I went on hormones, or when he told me that my hair was growing fast. Beautiful means joy and loss. Beautiful sliced a wound in us, as I knew it would, and each time Tom said it, he scratched the scab. Hot is good. Hot means hot.

Death makes room for fear and regret like that.”

Transitioning feels like submitting to the forces I long resisted. Letting the flood take me. Sometimes, though, it feels like the opposite. Like I’m suspended by hooks rather than in water. My body on display for doctors and surgeons and for people with opinions not worth sharing but that they share anyway. We should think about how to optimize your breast growth. Have you considered getting a brow lift, too? Is she, like, going to go all the way? Is that a girl? Do you think she’s got a dick? It’s a new uphill fight.

His drag was different to what I did in Death’s a Drag, or what I do now. A disguise that slowly transformed from an evening costume to my everyday life. A way of dressing and being to soothe an internal dissonance.

There was this discord, I guess. You being the Ming I wanted caused you pain, and I get that, but I think losing that Ming caused me more pain than I wanted to admit.”

“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.” “I don’t think that’s pathological, Tom. It’s okay to need people, and it’s nice to be needed. It all sounds human to me. Loving someone who needs you is safer, isn’t it? It’s like entrusting someone with an organ, a part of yourself, you know.” “Showing your belly, I guess.” “Like when a cat lies on its back?” I ask. “I like that.”

“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.