Nicola Dinan

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at a university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a charming young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom's awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming's orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he's already mapped out their future together. But, shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.

From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face shifts in their relationship in the wake of Ming's transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises - some personal, some professional, some life-altering - Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?

Bellies

Lindsay

There were a million interesting things to say and I couldn’t think of one of them.

Nobody wants to admit that people leave the closet but not the room.

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

with an expression of unguardedness that was intrinsically guarded.

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

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.

These things were supposed to be superficial, but the change felt greater than the sum of its parts. How flimsy is the self if cut away by steel scissors?

“Do you ask other people to help you? To come with you.”

We have a back-and-forth about what we can and cannot ask people to do. We conclude that if they love you, they’ll do these things for you, but you’ll never know if you don’t ask.

“There is an urge to deny yourself support,” she says.

Check. I know where this is going, and so I decide to cut the shit.

“Maybe I don’t think I’m deserving of support.”

“If we think about you after your mother died, crying in the closet. There is a shame there. A shame in being seen, in being helped. Being helped can mean being seen.”

“I think that’s what everyone who wants a relationship says.”

I flushed with scarlet unease. Do I want a relationship? Why is that so hard to admit?

“But can you really have a relationship if you can’t say it’s what you want?”

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.

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