Bellies

by Nicola Dinan

I think about what Janice said about fighting upward. Am I fighting upward? 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. Maybe it’s subversive, too, but I still can’t shake the desire to reach Hertfordshire-Sunday-roast-and-berry-picking normality. It’s pathetic.

All I can think about is how much I still want Tom to love my body, the one I can finally love but worry I’ve ruined.

At each corner of life I am reminded of the ways in which I haven’t collected the things I need. Wedding clothes. Office clothes. Death clothes. It’s like learning my mother tongue in later life. Whenever I think of this, the stupid takes I’ve read on the internet murmur in the back of my mind. Dress? A dress?! Oh my god, of course the trans woman wants to wear a black dress. Narcissist. Worrying about clothes even at a funeral! I bet it’s made of latex. That’s what they think being a woman is!

There are times and places where all I want is to speak the language of femininity well enough that I can disappear.

“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.