“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 don’t know if I mentioned that before. We’re Palestinian. But when you’re in Denver, those distinctions don’t matter as much. Lebanese. Iraqi. 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. My husband and I only fly into Denver when we go skiing up in Vail or Breckenridge.”

“I’ve only been skiing once. But I’ve heard those places are nice. Expensive. The lift tickets or ski passes, I mean.”

She shifts in her seat. “Let’s not get off track, Dena. The memory. Tell me. What was it?”

“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 in the kitchen, laughing, smoking. My mom called me in. She started speaking in Arabic and I only understood a few words 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. But if I put myself in my body back in that moment, and I really tried to do that this week, I would feel so hurt. Just so hurt by my mom that she would just violate my body this way. I know it’s cultural to some degree. Like there are degrees of ownership over your child’s body. I feel like someone who has always been a little on the masculine side. But now I was growing these boobs and my mom made a spectacle of it. I don’t know.”

“I think you do know, though,” she says.

“I just know that I became 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.

I look down at my legs, covered in black denim. In the pockets of my denim, the silver keys to a huge Brooklyn apartment with too many roommates, a home-made 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.

dena harry saleh (they/them) is a nonbinary, queer, neurodivergent Palestinian American. They are also an elder millennial. When they are not writing or reading, they teach college classes, co-parent young humans, play, listen to, and sing impassioned music.