“I remembered something. You told me to open myself up to memories about my mother, and I do remember something,” I murmur, a little bashful.
“Tell me about it,” my new therapist says. She’s not just my new therapist. She’s my first therapist. If my MetroCard doesn’t make me a New Yorker, then this surely makes it official.
“We were at my aunt’s house. We called her my aunt, but she’s really just a family friend who’s also Muslim. Lebanese. My family is Muslim. I know I already mentioned that we’re Palestinian. But when you’re in Denver, those distinctions don’t matter as much. Lebanese. Syrian. Palestinian. We can all be aunts or uncles or cousins because we’re Arab Muslims. Have you been to Denver?” I ask her.
“Not really,” she shifts in her seat, narrows her eyes. “But let’s not get off track, Dena.”
“Right,” I clear my throat, feeling like I’ve been caught daydreaming in class by the teacher. “Anyway. She—my mom—called me up from playing hide-and-seek with my cousins downstairs. Again, not really my cousins by blood. Just friends of the same age who are also Brown people. The men were upstairs playing poker, smoking, being loud. The women were sitting in the kitchen, laughing, smoking. My mom called me in. She started speaking in Arabic and I only understood a little and then suddenly she pulled my shirt up in front of all of the women. She touched me, like, grabbed and pinched my boobs. And in Arabic, she was like, look at this 11 year old who’s growing boobs already.”
“How did that make you feel?” she leans forward a little.
“So embarrassed. But also, so alone. Like I was standing there with four or five women, and it might as well have been four or five hundred women, but I just felt a thousand miles away from anyone. I saw their faces. Like I should be ashamed.”
She makes a sound like mmmm, encouraging me to go on.
I do. “I really think I just left my body after that. I’ve always known that I was different. Queer. Even though that’s not what it was called back then, of course. Back then it was just gay. Anyway, I had this memory and I imagined myself traveling back into my body at that moment. It felt like my mom was holding my shirt up for hours even when it was just seconds. I started feeling cold, I got goosebumps and my brow furrowed, I tried to look around at anything else in the room besides the faces staring at me. I felt all the women looking up at me from the table, felt the shake of their heads. I couldn’t even look at my chest. I felt owned, and I wanted so badly to scream at them, but I didn’t say anything. I don’t know.”
“I think you do know, though,” she says.
“I guess I became more disembodied. I left my body a lot after that. And before that. I don’t remember a lot of my childhood because I think I lived just outside of my body.”
“Are you outside of your body now?” she asks.
My chest heaves as I look down at my legs, covered in soft black denim, hanging low on my waist, a little too loose, but tight at the pockets. In one of those pockets, the clump of silver keys both bulges outward and jabs tight into my thigh. The keys go to a huge Brooklyn apartment with too many roommates, and to the bar where I work. In another pocket, my homemade duct tape wallet with little more than two dollars in it and a MetroCard. My MetroCard. In my wallet. In my jeans. On my body.
