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.

There was a large field behind it, and boys built like tractors played rugby at the far end. It always scared me how much those boys ate. A rotisserie chicken for each of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Their farts could kill a small child.

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

Sometimes I wondered if he was comfortable doing this with me or if it was all pretend, but maybe the only way to close the gap between who you are and who you pretend to be is to keep pretending.

“Then why are you still friends with them?” “Because I put up with it at the time, and people change and people forget and they don’t say sorry,” he said, his eyes shut and arms folded.

Emphasis on volume over quality, because quality is exposing, and trying too hard for it is embarrassing.

He said his heart is much better when he’s around me. He needs me. And then I wondered why I wanted so much reassurance, anyway, why I’d let myself arrive at a place where I was so uneasy, why I couldn’t just be happy that he transmuted me into a more tolerable version of myself.

visits to forums on how to support your partner. Support your partner in other ways. Support your partner in ways that don’t provide them with reassurance. Being a good partner is counterintuitive. Being a good partner will sometimes feel like being a bad partner. Everyone prefers the feeling of handing out sweets over broccoli. But sometimes I want candy.

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.

Jason was unmoved when I suggested that capitalism and the liberation of queer people were incompatible.

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.

And then I wonder if I’m going to become an overfilled Tupperware. Am I an overfilled Tupperware? Maybe everyone shuts up about what they want. Maybe that’s normal. Maybe everyone in the world is a fucking overfilled Tupperware.

When the train arrives, I climb on and sit opposite a girl who smiles at me. She’s wearing loose trousers and a stripy top with a cardigan. She has her hair in a bun on top of her head. She looks like an ally. The kind that doesn’t know any queer people but makes her boyfriend watch Drag Race. I wonder what’s going on in her head when she looks at me. Probably nonsense. Slay coochie mama queen yes god tongue pop!

More Ming than Michael. Michael is something more than the name my father called me. I spoke about it with Elina last week. Michael is the gay me, the me who isn’t mentally ill, the me who could live as a boy. The boy who likes to fuck like one. Michael would want a job like Tom’s. Michael wouldn’t fuck up an expensive education because he was worried he was dying. Michael could be what Tom needs. After I came out, I began to see that maybe Tom loved Michael instead, and the question for us was not where Ming would go, but how much of Michael would stay.

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 seemed that whatever I did with this body, wherever I took it, my mind carried the past and all its wrongs with it, even as I lay naked on the tarpaulin.

Sometimes I have dreams where I’m still a boy. It makes me wonder if one day I’ll forget I’ve transitioned, look down at my body and scream. It’s a scary thought, especially given the state of things. A crumbling NHS. The fact that some Americans wear dog tags telling people not to call an ambulance if they have a seizure because they’re so expensive.

Some of his shame seeps through the phone. I feel sad for him, and I wonder what my world would look like if men didn’t cower from their desires. Maybe not that different, because male desire has rarely done much good for anyone. I scroll through the rest of the notifications. The picket fence of dick pics is at once both offensive and vile, but I feel a thread of gratification that I am loath to admit, even though it shouldn’t be a crime to say that it feels good to be desired, especially behind the safety of the internet. I hug my phone, a portal to a sea of dicks.

“She got married last year, and she posted an announcement that she’s pregnant. It’s a picture of her and her husband holding the corner of an ultrasound.” Rob shot up, popped his hip and held his passport in front of him between his thumb and index finger as if it were a sonogram picture. “The caption was something like, oops! We did a thing! And I just thought, fuck, that’s deranged.”

He says hello to me. I look down and pick up my pace. He laughs. I never know if they know, but I don’t think it matters. Those looks come from a place of either hate or lust, and I’ve learned that those things often aren’t far apart.

I bought a black dress. There are times and places where all I want is to speak the language of femininity well enough that I can disappear. Airport security. Bathrooms. Funerals.

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.

And the prerequisite to all of this seems to be history, even if some stretches are beautiful and others are torrid and ugly. It’s time I spent with Tom; time I wouldn’t and couldn’t have spent with anyone else.