MATRYOSHKA

Therapist calls it structural dissociation. We consist of many parts: protector and exile, anxiety and depression, villain and victim. Not Dissociative Identity Disorder, Therapist says, bending to extract a yellow packet from the filing cabinet, no, this sounds like secondary dissociation, which means your CPTSD creates conflicting trauma responses, dividing your emotions in a way that allows you to control them without flooding your senses. Does this seem right?

Yes and no, we say.

Therapist puts the packet in our hands. Chalky yellow paper sends shivers through our shells. Try this, she says. Relax. Notice where the pressing is in your body. Anything urgently trying to get out.

We feel the hot line across our stomach, the itching of it, the salmon-soft space between our thighs. Space that consumes us; begs to be filled and begs to be emptied.

Where is it? says Therapist. What does it want?

What do we want? Her.

We laugh. I can’t do this yet. I don’t trust you yet. Therapist laughs. Yes, it takes time, yes, yes, but feel it. Are you feeling it?

Therapist has cameras in the waiting room. We wait at Target instead, filling the cart with pumpkin spice K-cups, press-on nails, motor oil, throw pillows, painkillers, lighters, mittens, boxers, bras. During lunch break, we slip through her Subaru window and toss a Target bag over her head. Enveloping hurts, it always does. We unbutton the flannel and unzip the scar, over our navel, our hip bones, our handles, our spine, and we open like a clam, the spleens like purple pearls inside. Pain sharpens our surroundings. Therapist’s unpleasant cries in the bag. A Little Tree oscillating from her rear-view mirror. 

With every cry she shrinks, and we squeeze her inside. We dress, adjust our collar and earrings, and ignore the yellow packets on the passenger seat, the DSM-catalog of our past. 

Does this seem right? we ask. Therapist is quiet.

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Long before we sought out therapy, we attended a leather workshop in Provincetown, sponsored in part by the shoe factory where we worked. For two weeks, we camped in the dunes, sand collecting in our sleeping bag and boots. At the work center, we waxed thread-ends and drilled eyelets and burnished edges. Our fingers grew bloated with effort. We walked to Commercial Street for Jarritos and street tacos, watching the older lesbians link hands, the ones who looked like sisters. Then we went to the library, admiring the enormous pirate ship extending past the mezzanine. This was the cheapest way to stay in Provincetown. We looked out the library window, at the drag queens and their quivering lashes, at the ferries leaving the harbor, and felt the rift widen between us and the world. 

On the third day, a Portuguese woman was sorting history books by the heater. We spoke for thirty minutes about the finer translations of Proust, and the landscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe, and the Portuguese bakery down the way, and being solo-poly and bored. We had sex in the gray basement. As we unraveled over her fingers, the tummy tuck scar opened up, flower petals of skin unfolding. Librarian leaned in and pulled the flap closed like a tent. We know she wanted it. Her enveloping is a collective memory, which starts to happen when any two people have enough sex. Their pleasure becomes yours.

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After enveloping, we must expel the bones. The skull is the worst part, for even shrunk it is the size of a lightbulb. The parietal bone takes hours to come unstuck from our jaw.

We tell Roommate we are sick. Roommate makes phở bò, her perfectly straight bangs contorting in the stove heat, as we hack the skull into our underwear drawer. The rest of the bones take approximately thirty hours to expel, starting with teeth and clavicles, and then the predictable spine, arms, pelvis, legs, toes. Once the drawer is full of miniature bones, we douse the collection in calcium powder for maximum growth. They never return to full size, but often developmentally resemble an eight-year-old’s skeleton with an adult set of teeth. With the skeleton, we pay rent. With the teeth, we buy weed.

Roommate knocks meekly on the bedroom door. We pretend to know what she looks like, frazzled and lip-bitten and soft the way women are. She sets out a bowl of broth and a plate of bean sprouts and chili oil and cilantro. She drapes a purple-inked note over the reusable wooden chopsticks. ENJOY. She sneaks back to her room, where she sits pleased in her hammock chair, forgetting the words of her poetry book as fast as she reads them.

We garnish our phở and ask Therapist how she is. Quiet. We hope she speaks soon for proper integration. The longer periods of silence create more complications for us in the unwrapping. With eighteen shells, it is difficult to puzzle back together, and even more difficult to sync our desires. Some of us prefer Ulta, others Sephora. The coins go and go.

Perhaps another therapist.

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The second enveloping was our girlfriend of six months. She was fiercely independent, the sole intern of a Boston real estate agency, and she was attracted to everyone, from her ultramarathon running coach to her four partners to her hawk-nosed lawyer cousin. She loved us because we had lived so many lives in so many years. Hospital RN and white-water rafter and librarian and vape store district manager and stonemason and professional vlogger and political columnist and Kohl’s cash connoisseur. We were fat and flexible and we had stunning eyes and we were insecure about our freckles and never looked in the mirror and we wore headscarves and pinky rings and bowties and binders and we owned leashes and grew mushrooms and spoke Russian and Portuguese and baked pecan pie and babka and malassadas, and we loved the art of loving, and we could make Girlfriend say please.

We jumped into things fast, which is one of our best qualities. One afternoon, we had Girlfriend blindfolded and handcuffed to our bedposts, and we noticed a long, discolored line across her stomach. She had taken self-tanner and crafted her own scar, a white thread, to resemble ours. She said, you own me. We said, it’s so easy to open up to you. Girlfriend said, please.

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Therapist is so quiet. She is quiet on our drive to the shoe shop, so second-nature we forget to crank the heat. At the shop, no customers come in. The clock hangs by two wires from the wall. The leather contorts and the shoe strings lace themselves. Therapist does not comment on our carpal tunnel, but we feel she feels we feel it.

Boss asks us to leave early, pinching the stark bridge of his nose, one finger on each tear duct. Therapist, what would happen if the clock fell right off? What would happen if he fired us?

We go to drag brunch in Back Bay and Therapist is quiet. We swipe on Grindr bears and Tinder dykes and Therapist is quiet. We consult our parts on what to do. Child likes bowling, so we bunny-ear the shoes, put the bumpers up, finger the eight-pound starburst ball. Chi O likes to pole dance, so we sink into martini, our thighs screeching pink. Librarian wants a massage. We can’t afford a massage. We can’t afford drag brunch or dating or bowling or pole class. Therapist, you know things. Help us!

Thanksgiving comes. Roommate has no one to feed, so she feeds us. She makes a feast of stir-fried tofu and spring rolls and gỏi gá and rice and fresh fruit for dessert. We make saffron-ginger tea and perch on the velvet bar stool, staring at the Starbucks across the street, a raccoon rolling itself to the weather drain. We eat and eat, but still, we are starving. We ask Therapist what she wants. She is quiet. What do we want? Someone. Something. Do we want Roommate?

Yes, and no, and yes and yes.

Roommate is rinsing dishes. She laughs to herself and says, fun fact about fruit flies, they dance and sing to attract each other like tropical birds. We say, I don’t like fruit flies. Who likes fruit flies? We are creeping up on her. Violent slope of eyebrow. Bad line of foundation on her temple. She doesn’t usually wear lipstick.

I like you, we say, leaning into the silence. Except for Therapist. She is screaming. You are full. You fool, YOU’RE FULL!

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We were happy with Librarian and Girlfriend until the shoe factory replaced humans with machines. For nine weeks of unemployment, we ate edible after edible, the bedsheets touching every part of us. Touched me too much. Touched us too much. Then we couldn’t afford rent. Had to find another masochist.

We matched on Bumble with the incumbent city commissioner. He talked about his polling percentages and his clueless wife and his fantasies about exhibitionism in public parks. We picked him up from his high-rise. Filled up at Shell, stopping for a new vape and Chex Mix. We got the new vape. He got the Chex Mix. Then we went to the dog park, and I don’t like what we did, I don’t like it, please stop telling the story.

Well, things like this happen in nature all the time. Enveloping is a form of endosymbiosis, the process where a bacterium forms a relationship with a host cell. The endosymbiont cannot survive without the host, but in the process of entering it must adapt: lose size, lose genes, become a shell of itself. Without the endosymbiont, the host cell cannot reproduce or function on its own. Enveloping is necessary. It’s natural. It happens.

The sun glistened through the April elms as City Commissioner walked down the white-strip sidewalk, saying hello to each and every dog. We found a secluded area overlooking the bay. There, we put one hand around his neck, index finger in the crook between his ear and jawbone. He gasped, thrilled, as we scratched down the length of our scar. Unzipped it, the sound like cat claws on cardboard. He looked into the red, heavy mess of organs. The blood drained from his face. He’d changed his mind.

We forced him by the neck inside. 

After the ordeal, we gazed across the ocean, overwhelmed by a strange apprehension. It felt like watching a child slide a finger into the gaps of a wrought iron table. Our cold knowing that he cannot rip his finger out. The pause before we help him.

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New Therapist is the only other female internal family systems specialist in Boston. We prefer females because they are more empathetic to our nonbinary woman biome: the confusion that comes with too many gendered parts. City Commissioner is vindictive and likes to point out how fat we look in fishnets, little globules of skin protruding past the black wires. We like to call him Man. I like to call you dyke cunt bitch. Do you think you can breathe without me?

New Therapist listens to our problems, the slew of fallacies and internal arguments and unhappy campers within us. She says, I suspect your financial insecurities have culminated in a scarcity mindset, which is feeding your anxious attachment style, particularly in your relationship with your roommate. You must heal from the inside. The first step is peeling off your primary protector. 

Then she asks, who’s in charge?

It’s a democracy, we say. 

Fool, says Therapist. In our mind’s eye, she dumps our entire makeup collection on New Therapist’s desk. Girlfriend’s goosebump-white concealer, Child’s fuchsia blush, Man’s makeup remover wipes. Server 1 and Server 2’s gold eyeshadows and cocoa-mint lip balms. Thin eyeliners, thick eyeliners, nude lipsticks, red lipsticks, fine powders, clear glosses. Suddenly we’re sitting cross-legged in our bedroom, with its gold-wrought vanity and heart-shaped string lights. We gaze down at our body, the purple-white shrinkage marks on our scantily-clad thighs, the thighs that eat up any river of fabric. We look up at the circle of people. Their familiar stone faces. Their rage.

We are not us, we just want to be.

New Therapist says, I’ve seen this before. A protector who thinks they speak for everyone.

Our nose burns. We stare out the window at the spindly maple and busy intersection rustling with beetle-cars. Behind our scar is the constant itch of damaged nerves, a place that scratching never reaches, that requires unzipping. If we unzip, will it all spill out?

You can put your parts at peace, says New Therapist.

Sure, we say.

You’ll have to trust me first.

We don’t. She knows nothing. Don’t tell her about dog park. Gotta pay rent. Trust me.

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After Man was Arborist and Child, then Server 1 and Server 2, who were in such denial they bought Guess jeans four sizes too small. I don’t like your body. We hate our body too. We binge ate until we were fat, and we lost weight until we were not, and we got the abdominoplasty, and we were unhappy, so we binged again and restricted again, and then we discovered enveloping. The more we enveloped, the more we had to remember. What brand of toothpaste do they like in the mornings, and how often do they forget to lock the door, and do they think of sex twelve times a day or not at all, and if they had to eat one meal for the rest of their life, what would it be? The wealth of new knowledge made it easy to forget the bad things. We don’t remember names. Names carry grief.

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We are home early from the shoe shop, eating spoonfuls of peanut butter, when Roommate bursts through the door. Her face is flushed and happy. She says, I got the job. We aren’t sure what job, but she’s talking about Provincetown and Bonecoin and moving out and out where? Out of our apartment? Double the rent? No bones in the drawer. Who is she without us? 

We slam her against the front door, swallowing the hot red ridges of her lips. The kissing is consensual. Even Child likes this. The slope of her nose, the sudden leg, sharp collarbone, and she’s gasping wet and deep like a fish we’ve caught. Where are we? Sitting on a dock. No, the Boston pier, eighteen of us, holding eighteen fishing poles, reeling in the scene. We can become anyone at the drop of a hat, even Child. I don’t like how close this lady is to me. I feel like a toy.

“Stop!” we say.

Stop?

“Get off.”

Roommate says, What? You kissed me. Do you even know what you want? 

That hurts. “I know what I want.”

It’s like this whole apartment belongs to you, she says, and I do everything for you and you don’t care. You’re insatiable. You suck all the energy dry like a vampire!

“I’m sorry.”

Roommate commands we leave. Down the elevator past the corridor of mailboxes, out onto the street where the Starbucks siren glows green on the snow-slick street. Past bustling restaurants full of small families, fathers cutting up hamburger meat for their toddlers. Shadowy lots and frost-covered work vehicles. The sharp wind carrying brine. A voice in our head, the same voice as the others: How can we fix this? 

Man shows us the bench where we assaulted him. Man. I assaulted him. 

We walk in the direction of the dog park, fracturing out of control. Part of us wants to book the next ferry to Provincetown and go to that one grocery store on the boardwalk. Angel Foods. Stand next to the check-out counter and cut off our limbs. Say, I’m selling myself. I’m buying the store. I’m eating it all. 

Empty and full are the same feeling. Like a knot tying a sailboat to a dock, loosening and tightening with the waves. Like the precipice of an orgasm, limbs tense and covered in waxy disappointment, waiting for not enough to become too much. We are tired of stimulation. We are tired of wanting. 

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At the dog park, there are leashed dogs, unleashed dogs, dogs with three legs, black dogs, pink dogs, cat-sized dogs, dogs the size of children. We sit on an icy bench and hope the dogs keep their distance. On our childhood trip to Moscow, we were attacked by two blond Akitas. While our parents walked ahead, the dogs sprinted from their owner’s yard, across the residential street. We froze, incapable of speech; the dogs chased; the parents didn’t see; the dogs gained; two snouts wrapped around the blue legs of our jeans. The crude pressure of teeth, and then disappointment. The soft trot away.

We wished the legs had come clean off, so the story would be true. An attack without accident does not feel like an attack at all. Therapist, where does the trauma begin? With our parents and the dogs, or with our eating disorder, the useless surgery, the financial pit after getting laid off, or did the sinkhole grow earlier, our joints expanding and contracting and widening until a single storm opened us up?

A wet-nosed Labrador comes sniffing, sand embedded in its coat. The bench numbs our endless expanse of skin. You can remember. Who is this? Dahlia. Who is this? Therapist.

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New Therapist says the moment you start naming your parts, letting them have power, is the moment you honor reintegration. She invites us to take off our shoes, recline on the chaise lounge, and turn our focus within. Asks where the protector lives.

“I’m living in the skin.”

Wonderful. And what does the skin want?

Minutes pass in insufferable silence. “We want everyone to be okay.”

That makes complete sense, says New Therapist. Why are you using the word we? 

The floodgates open and voices sound, collecting like raindrops on a windshield: We don’t want you to speak for us. Desperate requests. Say you’re sorry. Flooding. Flooded. 

“I’m sorry, I can’t do this right now.” We throw on our shoes and run out the door. If we stay, we’ll have to apologize to Man for ruining his city commissioner career, and to Child for depriving them of puberty, and say sorry to Server 1 and Server 2 who will always be servers, and Librarian for not reading enough, and Girlfriend for avoiding her partners, and Chi O for not donating to her philanthropy, and Arborist for not adopting a cat, and Therapist for abducting her before lunch. Sorry to the nine people we forgot to name, and Roommate who never had one.

Try using I, Therapist says, above the clamoring voices.

I’ve forgotten what I means. The word is new and empty. 

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Roommate is in the kitchen, packing her dishes into cardboard boxes. Bits of newspaper stuffed in each wine glass. I refill the kettle with water and prepare the chamomile. 

“What’s your name?” I ask. 

“You don’t know?” she gasps.

“I don’t.”

“Why ask now?”

A long, blank space of neglect.

She’s angry. “Seriously, why?”

Why why why why why whywhywyhywhywhwywhy. We don’t want this.

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A week before Christmas, a dozen customers visit the shoe shop. Boss lets me stay the entire shift. My fingers ache as I unlock the apartment door. Strangely, Roommate has made bánh mì for both of us, and we sit side by side on the velvet barstools, silent except for the crunch of bread. She doesn’t tell me her name.

I drive to the dog park, and I remember the entire drive. The ocean is a cool, black mirror. The shells are expanding, and I’m tired of holding them. I’m overwhelmed and worthless and ravenous and scared. Therapist says, yes, you can be all of those things. It doesn’t matter where the pain came from; it’s how you feel it. 

I put Man on a pedestal in my mind, like a seagull on a peering. If I were going to apologize to you, where would I start?

He already has a list: Vote in the next election. Go golfing. Stop telling my story. 

“So tell it,” I say with frustration. “Tell your stories.”

You ruined my life and I’ll never use Bumble again. I spent my career researching the mass extinction of stone crabs due to maladaptive feeding patterns, and I’m pissed you keep going to happy hour at the crab shack. I love chocolate and bowling and Colorado. Have you had a glass of water today? You owe me a Coors Light. I love being inside you. Please visit my parents’ graves. I had a friend who slathered herself in bear spray to ward off bears, and she spent six days in the hospital. My wife and kids were the best thing to ever happen to me. You made me feel sexy again. I miss my body. Bitch you better donate to Make-A-Wish. Salem died in my apartment. I was a drag king and I never told anyone. Go buy some melatonin so I can get some fucking peace and quiet. É o que é. Hey hon, it’s Dahlia, and trust me, it’s gonna be a long uphill battle.