Dump Your Puppygirl

Weaponized incompetence wears a collar.

the following is a vent post that was taken too far. For the sake of full transparency, I’ll keep it up, but I’ve removed parts that were interpreted as ableist or transmisogynistic on my end. I apologize for those aspects. I do not apologize for having vented and attempted to find a way to make sense of any of these mechanisms described even if I did so inaccurately.

This essay is free to read unfortunately.

You wake up at six because she had a crisis at two and you couldn’t sleep after. You lie in the dark for forty minutes after she finally goes under, watching the ceiling, listening to her breathing change. You think about how you have to be on a call at nine. You think about how the dishes from her midnight snack are still in the sink. You think about how you forgot to pay the electricity bill again, because last night you were on the phone with her other partner explaining that the puppygirl was not, in fact, going to leave the polycule, that she had said it in the way she sometimes says things when she is dysregulated, that it would pass. You eventually fall asleep at three-thirty. The alarm at six is brutal.

You make coffee in the dark so you don’t wake her. The kitchen counter has crumbs from a sandwich you did not make. There is a wet towel on the floor of the bathroom. There is a hair tie on the bathmat. There is a mug with the remains of chamomile tea you brewed her at one in the morning sitting on the windowsill where she left it. You wipe the counter. You pick up the towel. You move the mug to the sink. You add it to the pile in the sink.

The dermatologist appointment was at ten-thirty. She’d booked it two months ago. She missed it last week. She missed the one before that in March. You call to reschedule. They have an opening on the twenty-fourth. You write it on the wall calendar because she will not see it in your shared Google calendar, which she does not check. You text her other partner to remind her that the puppygirl has an appointment on the twenty-fourth. The other partner is at work. She thumbs-ups the message.

You log on to your own work two hours late. Your manager has been gentle with you about your hours for the last three months. She is not going to be gentle for much longer. You write a Slack apology and pin it to the channel so people can see you tried. You make a list of the four things you need to ship today. You eat a piece of toast standing at the counter while your laptop boots.

She wakes at one-forty-five. You hear her in the bedroom. She makes a small sound which is the sound she makes when she is up. You go to her. She holds her arms up like a child. You lift her into a hug and she cries for a few minutes into your shoulder about a dream she had in which her mother was disappointed in her. You stroke her hair. You tell her she is safe. You make her toast. You make her tea. You take her laptop out of the bedroom because the night before she had asked you to take it away from her so that she wouldn’t scroll. She has not done any work today. She is not expected to. The polycule has agreed that her freelance graphic design work is impossible right now because of her dysphoria, and so until further notice she is “in a resting period.” It has been fourteen months.

At seven that night the polycule meets to discuss the rent. There is a gap of seven hundred dollars. Your other partner makes a spreadsheet. You front the seven hundred. You have done this every month for nine months. The conversation in the spreadsheet is about whether the gap is sustainable. Nobody says her name. Her name does not need to be said. She is in the kitchen making herself a piece of toast and crying quietly because she can tell that you are upset.

After the meeting your other partner stays. She is crying. She tells you that she feels like the puppygirl is going to leave her, that she has been distant for weeks, that she doesn’t know what to do. You tell her, no, the puppygirl loves her, the puppygirl is just struggling. You stay with her for an hour. You walk her to the train at ten. You walk back. You think about your call in the morning. You think about the seven hundred dollars. You think about whether you’ve eaten today.

The dishes are in the sink. She is asleep. You do them. It is eleven-fifteen.

You have been living inside the structure of your week long enough that you no longer notice it has a structure. You think it is what loving her costs. You think loving her is supposed to cost.

She had said it to you, last week, holding your face in her hands at three in the morning after a crisis. “I don’t know what I would do without you. You’re the only one who really sees me.” You had believed her. You had wept.

There is a husband somewhere in a suburb of Atlanta who has been asked, every Wednesday for six years, to remember to pick up the children’s allergy medication from the CVS on the way home from work. He has not done it once. His wife now picks it up herself on her lunch break. He is proud of how he never raises his voice and never controls her movements. He thinks of himself as a good husband.

There is a boyfriend in Seattle who, after his girlfriend asked him to start loading the dishwasher, loaded it so creatively that the bowls came out with dried-on yogurt and a glass cracked in the heat cycle. She unloaded the dishwasher and reloaded it correctly. She did this four times. She now loads the dishwasher. He says it is because she is “particular.” His friends agree she is particular. He has not loaded the dishwasher in fourteen months.

There is a father in Cleveland who buys his daughter an extravagant birthday present every year, in front of his wife who buys the daughter clothes and dental appointments and tutoring and Christmas every year. The daughter associates joy with her father and obligation with her mother. The father knows this. He has chosen this. His wife will die before he understands what he chose.

There is a brother somewhere who comes home for the holidays and is fed first, attended to first, asked his opinion first, by the mother whose unmarried daughter is in the kitchen making the dinner. The brother has not noticed. The mother has not noticed. The daughter has noticed every year since she was twelve.

These men have a sister. She lives with you. She wears a collar.

She is twenty-seven. She has been on hormones for four years. She is small, by which I mean she presents small. She wears soft pastels and oversized sweaters that fall off one shoulder. She owns three different chokers and a black leather collar with a silver ring at the throat that her other partner bought her for her birthday. She wears the leather collar on days when she wants to be held. She wears the pink one with a heart-shaped tag on days when she is doing okay. You have learned to read which collar she has put on before you ask how she is feeling.

She has bangs. The bangs are crooked because she cuts them herself, in the bathroom, when she’s anxious, and she’s anxious often. Her voice is soft and slightly girlish, with a small upward pitch at the end of every sentence that has settled, over time, into her voice. She apologizes a great deal. She apologizes for taking up space. She apologizes for being a burden. She apologizes for asking. The apology is a way of asking again, with an additional charge laid on the listener for having required the apology.

She says “sorry” before entering a room. She says “sorry I’m being so much” three times in any conversation that lasts more than ten minutes. She says “no but really, sorry, can you tell me to stop?” which is itself a request for further attention. She says “you don’t have to,” which is the form the asking takes when she has already calculated that you will. She says “I love you so much it scares me,” holding your hand, looking at you with wide wet eyes, and the saying of it is the contract.

She is on three different Discord servers. Two are trans women’s group chats. One is a polycule server she shares with her partners. She posts in the polycule server every day at irregular hours. She posts pictures of her stuffed animals. She posts pictures of herself in the collar. She posts memes about being a stupid girl who can’t do anything right. She posts when she is going to bed and when she has woken up. She posts when she is sad. When she posts that she is sad, her partners come to attend to her. The posting is the asking.

She has an Instagram with twelve hundred followers. The bio reads “soft girl, anxious girl, your girl.” She posts selfies in which she looks shy. She posts pictures of small breakfasts she did not make. She posts pictures of you sometimes, in which you are doing something tender for her: holding her hand, brushing her hair, kissing her forehead. The pictures of you are some of her most popular posts. People in the comments tell her she has such a sweet girlfriend.

She does not work. She is in what the polycule calls a “rest period,” which began fourteen months ago when she stopped taking freelance clients, and which has not yet ended. She is on Medicaid. Her hormones are covered. Her therapist is covered. Her rent is not covered. Her phone is not covered. Her groceries are not covered. Her transit is not covered. Her clothes are not covered. Her three Discord Nitro subscriptions are not covered. None of these are covered. You and her other partners cover all of them between you. She does not have a budget. She has needs. The needs are met because the alternative to meeting them is the spiral.

She has anxiety. She has dysphoria. The conditions are real. The conditions are also, in the polycule’s hands, the apparatus by which any request made of her becomes a request that violates her. The polycule has agreed in advance that the diagnoses answer every question. Anything you might say in response to a diagnosis is, by definition, an attack on the diagnosis, and so the labor question never gets raised. The conditions are not the problem. The closure built around the conditions is. Plenty of women with anxiety do the dishes. Plenty of women with dysphoria pay their share of the rent. The puppygirl is not the only person in the polycule with diagnoses. She is the only person in the polycule whose diagnoses are treated as a finished sentence.

She is the softest member of the polycule. The softness is the armor. To raise your voice around her is to be cruel to a puppy. To leave the room when she is crying is to abandon her. To ask her to do the dishes is to misunderstand her sensory issues. To ask her to make a phone call is to misunderstand her anxiety. To ask her to pay her share of the rent is to misunderstand the dysphoria that makes work impossible for her. Each request becomes, by virtue of being made of her, a small cruelty against a small girl, and the polycule has agreed in advance that small cruelties against small girls are the thing the polycule exists to prevent. The room arranges itself around her capacity. Everyone else’s capacity is figured as abundance.

Your other partner says, often, “She’s so brave for being as soft as she is.” Your other partner says it with tenderness in her voice. Your other partner is not wrong to feel the tenderness. The tenderness is the apparatus. Someone in the polycule Discord, in response to one of her late-night posts, writes “you are loved, you are precious, the world doesn’t deserve you.” Twelve other people heart it. She screenshots the comment. She sends the screenshot to you. She writes underneath it: “look how loved I am, baby.” You heart the screenshot. You do not say what you are thinking, which is that the people in the Discord do not have to do her dishes.

You have a job. You have a job and an apartment and a body that can be made to function on four hours of sleep, and so what you have is figured as plenty, and what she has is figured as not enough, and the gap between the two is figured as the obvious place for the redistribution to flow.

Monday. You made her breakfast and ate yours over the sink. You drove her to a doctor’s appointment because she could not face the bus. You waited in the parking lot. You drove her home. You cancelled your evening plans because she was too tired after the appointment to be alone. You made dinner. You did the dishes. You read to her until she fell asleep. You worked on your laptop in the kitchen until one.

Tuesday. She had a crisis at four in the afternoon because someone had been mean to her in a Discord server. You spent an hour on the call with her. She said, “Why is everyone always so cruel to me. I can’t believe she said that. I can’t believe she’s like that, baby.” You said, “I know, baby. I know.” You sent screenshots of the conversation to her other partner so she would have backup. You drafted a reply for her to post that she did not post. You made her tea. You ordered her dinner because you didn’t have time to cook between her crisis and your six PM standup. You missed the standup.

Wednesday. You paid her phone bill. You paid her transit card. You paid her therapy copay because she’d forgotten to pay it and the office was about to drop her. You came home from work and she was tired so she went to bed and you did the dishes from the morning, which had not been done, because the morning’s dishes are always still in the sink.

Thursday. She posted in the polycule Discord at three in the morning that she didn’t know if she could keep going. You woke up to forty-seven notifications. You spent two hours on the phone with her. You did not sleep again that night. You worked from bed the next day with the camera off. You forgot to eat lunch. You forgot to eat dinner. You ate a granola bar at ten and called it a day.

Friday. She wanted sex. You had sex. You did not want sex. You had sex anyway. After, she cried because she was overwhelmed, and you held her for forty minutes while she said you were so good to her, you were the best girlfriend, she didn’t deserve you. She said, “You’re the only one who really knows how to hold me.” She said, “I don’t deserve you. I really don’t, baby. I really don’t.” You said, “I love you.” You said it to the ceiling. You stayed up with her until she fell asleep. You did not sleep until four.

Saturday. The polycule had brunch. You were the one who made the reservation. You were the one who reminded everyone. You were the one who paid for her plate because she had forgotten her card. You were the one who walked her home because she was tired. You spent the afternoon at home with her watching a show she wanted to watch.

Sunday. You did all the laundry. You did all the grocery shopping. You meal-prepped for both of you for the week. You answered four emails on her behalf, two to her therapist and two to her landlord. She watched TikTok in the bedroom and called out to you twice for snacks.

Her last seven days. Sleep. The Discord. The TikTok. The collar. The crises. The sex she initiated. The brunch she attended. The meal she did not pay for. The appointment she attended in a car you drove.

The hours go in one direction.

The mark in any polycule is the figure whose body, social currency, and physical labor become the polycule’s shared resources. The mark is the structurally feminized position in the configuration. The polycule organizes itself around her capacity, calibrates to her availability, treats her labor as the medium through which the polycule produces itself as a polycule. The puppygirl appears, from inside the polycule, to be that figure. She looks like the smallest. She looks like the one being protected. Her appearance of being the mark is the means by which she escapes being the mark. The actual mark in the configuration is whichever partner is fronting her rent, regulating her affect, defending her conduct, and absorbing her crises. The puppygirl has mobilized the aesthetic of being a figure in need of protection in order to position herself as the figure being protected, which is the position from which the labor of the other women in the configuration can be extracted in her name. The smallness she performs is the smallness inside of which other women’s labor disappears. She is a trans woman extracting from trans women, and the aesthetic that licenses the extraction is the aesthetic of being most in need. The polycule does not see the extraction because the extraction is happening through care, and the care is figured as the polycule’s central good.

The polycule says, when it gathers, that she needs more support this week. The polycule says, “She’s been having a really hard time, you know?” The polycule says, “I’m worried about her.” The polycule does not say, in the same meetings, that she is the most-supported member of the configuration by a measurable margin. The polycule has never run the math. The polycule would describe the math, if you raised it, as cold.

She wants sex when she is upset, which is often. The wanting is not a wanting of you, although it presents as one. The wanting is a way of returning to her body, which has gone unfamiliar to her, and a way of confirming that her body is loved, which she requires confirmed at increasing frequency over time, because each confirmation only lasts until the next destabilization, and the destabilizations come every few days. She wants sex in particular when something has gone wrong in her day, when she feels small, when she feels ugly, when she has been triggered by something on the internet, when her therapist has said something she did not like, when she has just gotten off a phone call with her mother. She wants sex because the alternative to sex is the conversation, and the conversation is the spiral.

She has said, more than once, “I just need to feel close to you right now.” She has said, “I just need to know you still want me.” She has said, “Please.” The asking is the work of staying loved. The asking has the texture of a small and frightened thing that will be hurt if you do not attend to it.

You have sex at the end of a fourteen-hour workday. You have sex when you have not eaten dinner. You have sex when you have a headache. You have sex when you are bleeding. You have sex because the alternative to having sex is the question, and the question is itself a sequence: whether you find her body disgusting, whether you find her unattractive, whether you have stopped loving her, whether you are going to leave her, whether there is someone else, whether it is her other partner, who is thinner and passes better and got her surgery younger. Each item in the sequence is harder to answer than the one before it, because each one is further from the original question of whether you wanted to have sex. The question is a four-hour conversation. The four-hour conversation is followed by sex, because she will need to be reassured that her body is loved. If you say no, you get the four hours plus the sex. If you say yes, you get the sex.

You say yes.

You have learned to want it earlier than you mean to. You have learned to read the signs that she is winding up toward asking and to offer first, so that the asking does not become the spiral, so that you maintain the appearance of want. The appearance of want is the wage you pay to keep her stable. You have not had sex you initiated for your own pleasure in seven months. You have not had sex that did not also include thirty minutes of reassurance after, in which you tell her she is beautiful, that you would never want anyone else’s body, that her other partner is beautiful too but you love hers, specifically, most.

The polycule calls this care. The polycule, watching from a distance, has decided that the puppygirl is sexually needy because she has been wounded, and that her partners’ willingness to meet her needs is the polycule’s strength. The wage you pay is not visible at this distance. The wage you pay does not appear in the polycule’s accounting.

She forgets to eat. She forgets to take her hormones. She forgets the appointment, and the next appointment, and the one after that. She forgets the date with her other partner. She forgets her keys. She forgets the password to the joint account she has, in theory, equal access to. She forgets the name of the person you have just been introduced to. She forgets she said she would do the dishes on Thursday. She forgets she said she would call her therapist’s office about the bill. She forgets she said she would meet you at the place at the time. Executive function difficulty is real, and many people in the polycule, including you, have some version of it. The pattern is not that she forgets. The pattern is that her forgetting is the polycule’s labor, and yours is yours, and the polycule has agreed in advance which forgettings the polycule will absorb. The forgetting is the shape of what is between you. The forgetting is who does what.

You remember each of these for her. The remembering has accreted, over fourteen months, into something larger than a list. There is a calendar that runs her life. There is a catalogue of her medications, an address book for her appointments, a directory of the people she knows and how she knows them, a current list of the foods she will and will not eat this month, an unwritten map of the topics she does not want raised. None of it is on paper. It is in your head, where it has been accreting for fourteen months, alongside the receptionists who now know your face, one of whom, at the dermatologist’s office, asks after the puppygirl by her chosen name in a tone that suggests the receptionist has formed a private opinion. You have become the apparatus of her continued legibility. You are the keeper of two interior lives, and one of them is not yours.

She does not have a list. She does not have a calendar. She has you. You are the list and the calendar. She does not know your therapy is on Wednesdays. She does not know your sister’s name. She has met your sister three times and has called her by the wrong name twice. You have stopped correcting her.

She says, “Oh my god I totally forgot, I’m so sorry, I’m such a mess.” She says, “You’ll handle it, right baby? Sorry, I’m just so overwhelmed.” She says, “What would I do without you, seriously, what would I do.” She says it the way someone says it who has decided in advance that the saying of it is the explanation. You handle it.

Ask her about the dishes.

You are standing in the kitchen. The dishes are from her last three meals. You have been working for ten hours and you are about to start dinner and the sink is full. You say, quietly, “Hey baby, can you do the dishes tomorrow when I’m at work? I’d really appreciate it.” You say it the way you have rehearsed it in your head for the last week. You say it gently. You do not raise your voice.

She is on the couch with her laptop. She freezes. She slowly closes the laptop. She sets it on the coffee table. She puts her face in her hands. She begins to cry. You stand in the kitchen with the dishes.

She begins to cry before you finish the sentence. The crying arrives before any specific charge has been laid, which is how you know the charge has already been registered, in advance of its content. The dishes were never what this conversation was going to be about. What you said was that you would like the dishes done. What she heard was that you had noticed something she could not do, and that the fact of your noticing had consequences. She begins to explain. She has been trying. The sensory issues have been worse this week than she has wanted to tell you, because she did not want you to worry. She had been planning, today, to surprise you by doing them. She had been about to. A text her mother had sent two months ago had hit her differently this morning. She is going to describe the text. She is going to describe the wording, and what she thinks her mother meant, and what she now suspects her mother has always meant, and the way her mother’s voice sounded when her mother used to say similar things to her in adolescence. You are going to sit in a kitchen full of unwashed plates while the mother takes the place of the dishes in the conversation. By the time she arrives at the question of whether she is a burden, the dishes have been gone from the room for forty minutes. The conversation is now about whether the polycule would be better off without her, and whether you are the one who is finally going to say it.

Your other partner is in the apartment. She comes out of the bedroom. She has heard the crying. She goes to the puppygirl. She sits down next to her on the couch and puts her arms around her. She looks at you over the puppygirl’s head. The look is patient. The look is the look of an adult managing a situation that another adult, an older one who should have known better, has caused.

Your other partner makes the puppygirl tea. Your other partner sits with her and strokes her hair. Your other partner murmurs to her that she is not a burden. Your other partner does not, at any point, ask about the dishes. The dishes have been removed from the conversation. The conversation is now about whether you are kind enough.

You stand in the kitchen with the dishes. After an hour, you do them.

Ask her about the rent.

Rent is due in two days. You sit down with her at the kitchen table. You have made her favorite tea. You have framed the conversation in your head as a budgeting conversation, not a guilt conversation. You have practiced your tone. You say, “I want to figure out a plan for your share of the rent. I think we can make it work but I want to think it through with you.”

She does not respond for a long moment. Then she says, very quietly, “I knew this was coming.”

She says she has been waiting for this conversation for months. She says she has known that the polycule has been carrying her for too long. She says she has been thinking about leaving for weeks. She says she has nothing to offer. She says you would be better off without her. She says she is going to call her therapist tomorrow and talk about what it would mean to “just go.”

You watch her get smaller in the chair. Your stomach drops. You start, immediately, the work of pulling her back. You say no, no, that is not what you meant, that is not what you are saying, you love her, you are not asking her to leave, you are asking how the two of you can make the numbers work. She is shaking. You go around the table and hold her.

Your other partner arrives. You did not call her. The puppygirl had texted her ten minutes before you sat down with the tea. Your other partner takes her into the bedroom and shuts the door. You sit at the kitchen table with two cups of cooling tea. You can hear her crying through the door. You can hear your other partner soothing her.

You can hear, faintly, that your other partner is saying that of course she can stay. You can hear that your other partner is saying that of course they will figure out the rent. You can hear that your other partner is saying that you didn’t mean what you said. After forty minutes, your other partner comes out of the bedroom. She closes the door behind her gently. She walks to the kitchen. She sits down across from you.

She says, “She’s really scared, baby. She thought you were asking her to leave.”

You say, “I wasn’t asking her to leave. I was asking how we make the rent work.”

Your other partner says, “I know. I know that. But you have to understand how she heard it.”

You pay the rent that month. You pay her share. You have paid her share every month since.

Ask her about the sex you did not want to have.

Sunday morning. You are in bed. You have not had your coffee. The sex was last night. She is curled against you in the bed, in her pink nightgown, with her hair fanned over your shoulder. She is awake. You have been lying there for an hour, awake, not moving, trying to figure out how to say what you want to say.

You say, “Baby. I want to talk about last night.”

She freezes. She does not move for a long moment. Then she says, “What about it?”

You say, “I didn’t really want to. I was really tired. I think I want us to be able to say no sometimes.”

There is a silence. You can feel her breathing change. You can feel her go still in the way she goes still when she is winding up.

She begins quietly, with the question of whether she was bad, and then whether she did something wrong, and you can watch the topic move outward from the act itself to her body, and from her body to your perception of her body, and from your perception of her body to the question of whether her body is one you want, and from there to the comparison with her other partner, who is thinner and passes better, and from there to the question of whether you are going to leave her, and from there to the question of whether you are going to leave her for her other partner. Each question is harder to address than the one before it, because each one is further from the thing you said. The sex you did not want to have is no longer in the room. By the time she has reached the question of whether you are leaving her for her other partner, the conversation cannot return to the sex without your traversing the four hours of reassurance that now sit between this moment and the original sentence you tried to say, and so the original sentence stays unsaid.

She tells you that she had known for weeks that you weren’t really attracted to her anymore. She tells you that her therapist had said this might happen. She tells you that she had been preparing herself. The preparation is the proof. If she has been preparing herself for it, then it is not new information, and you are responsible now for the act of not wanting sex and also for the months in which she has been bracing for the day you would tell her you no longer wanted sex.

You spend two hours that morning telling her that you are attracted to her, that her body is beautiful, that you love her body, that you only want her body, that her other partner’s body is fine but you want her body specifically. You spend two hours apologizing for having said what you said. You spend two hours undoing it.

You do not have sex that morning either. You also do not say what you wanted to say.

Ask her about the pattern.

This one is harder. You have to do it in a polycule meeting because it is a polycule conversation. You have prepared. You have written notes. You have talked to your therapist. You have run through what you will say.

You say, “I want to talk about how we are distributing labor in the polycule. I want to talk about the rent. I want to talk about who is doing the dishes. I want to talk about how the appointments are getting booked. I think there’s a pattern.”

You do not get further than this.

She is sitting in the armchair. She has the leather collar on. She is wearing the oversized sweater that she wears when she is anxious. She begins to cry. She says, into her hands, “I knew you saw me this way.”

She says you are being cruel. The cruelty has been laid before the substance of what you said has been engaged with. She says she has been doing her best, and the case for her best is the list of her diagnoses, which functions as the case against your having anything further to say. The anxiety. The dysphoria. The rest period. Each of these is the reason she cannot do the dishes, and each is the reason she cannot pay the rent, and each is the reason the question of the dishes and the rent should not have been raised by you, who do not have those diagnoses, or whose diagnoses have been weighed and found compatible with continued function. Anything you say in response to a diagnosis is, by definition, an attack on the diagnosis, and the polycule has agreed in advance that diagnoses are not to be attacked. She wonders aloud whether you have always seen her this way, whether the affection was real, whether you ever wanted her at all, whether you are with her out of pity, and the wondering is not a question to which she expects an answer. The wondering is the reframing. The labor question recedes. In its place is the question of what kind of person you are, and what kind of person you have always been, and whether the polycule should have trusted you with her in the first place. She tells the polycule that she feels ambushed. She tells the polycule she does not feel safe. The polycule, watching, looks at you.

Your other partner stands up. Your other partner crosses the room and sits on the arm of the armchair and puts her arm around the puppygirl. Your other partner looks at you and says, in a tone you have not heard before, “I think we need to take a break.”

The polycule takes a break. You are the only one in the kitchen during the break. Your other partner is in the bedroom with the puppygirl. After twenty minutes, your other partner comes out and asks if you can talk in the hallway. In the hallway your other partner tells you that you have to apologize. Your other partner tells you that she knows you are stressed, that she knows things have been hard, but that what you said in there was not okay. Your other partner tells you that the puppygirl is fragile right now, that her therapist had said this week was going to be a hard one, that you had to know that. Your other partner tells you that the polycule has been worried about you, and about your patience, for a few weeks now.

You apologize. You go back into the living room. You apologize to the puppygirl, who is curled up in the armchair under a blanket, sniffling. The polycule reconvenes. The conversation is not about the labor. The conversation is about how you have been feeling, whether the stress of your job is making you “snippier” than you used to be. By the end of the meeting you are the one being held. You are the one who apologized. You are the one for whom a self-care plan has been written, in the notes app of the polycule’s shared phone, by the puppygirl, who has volunteered, while you were apologizing, to be more attentive to your needs.

The break comes from your other partner. Not in a polycule meeting. On a Tuesday afternoon in the spring, over coffee, just the two of you, for the first time in a long time. You have not made plans, just the two of you, for almost a year. The puppygirl is at her therapist. The two of you took the opportunity.

You are sitting across from her in the booth. You have ordered. You are halfway through your coffee. She is looking at you. She is looking at you for a long moment. Then she says, “How are you actually doing.”

You start to give the answer you have been giving for months. You start to say you are doing okay. You start to say it has been a hard few weeks. You start to deflect. She watches you start to deflect. She lets you get a sentence and a half into it. Then she says, “Sister. Stop.”

You stop.

She tells you she has been watching. She has not slept the same in months. She has been doing the math, on the rent, on the hours, on the timing of the crises, which she has begun to plot against the calendar and to notice happen the day before the rent is due, or the day before someone in the polycule has been planning to take a weekend away from the apartment, or the day after the puppygirl has been quiet for too long and needs the polycule to come back into focus around her. She tells you that the puppygirl said something to her three weeks ago that did not add up, and that when she went back and checked, it had been a lie. A small one. About where the puppygirl had been on a Thursday. The puppygirl had told her she was with you. She had not been with you.

You sit in the booth. You do not move for a long moment. The coffee gets cold.

She does not think the puppygirl is a bad person. She does not think the puppygirl is doing this on purpose. She does not think any of that matters, because what is happening is happening whether or not the puppygirl intends it, and what is happening can be measured in hours, and the hours add up the same way regardless of intention. She tells you the math.

She has been spending eight hours a week on the puppygirl’s emotional labor and four hours on the rent gap. You have been spending fourteen on the emotional labor, six on the domestic, four on rent, and an unknown amount on what she calls “the apologies you give for things you didn’t do.” The third partner, she tells you, has been spending less. The third partner is the puppygirl’s newer girlfriend. The third partner is, currently, the favorite. The third partner is currently being given the version of the puppygirl that you remember from year one, the version that did the dishes, the version that paid her share, the version that asked you how your day had been.

There is always a third partner, she tells you. When she came in three years ago, you had been the third partner. You had been the one who got the version of the puppygirl that did the dishes, the version that paid her share, the version that asked you how your day had been, the version that remembered which day of the week your therapy was on. The woman who had been with the puppygirl before her had been the one carrying the load. The woman left. Within six weeks of her leaving, the puppygirl had a sensory crisis that took her out of her freelance work. The rest period began that week. The rest period has not ended.

She had blamed the woman who left. The polycule had decided, together, that the woman who left was the one who had failed. The polycule had grieved that woman as a casualty of the puppygirl’s wounds. She tells you this with her hands flat on the table, looking at you, and you understand that she is telling you what she had been part of, and what you had also been part of, because the grieving of the woman who left had been a polycule project, and you had grieved her too.

She is looking at you across the table. She is not crying. She is the most clear-eyed she has been in a year.

She says, “Sister. I think we have to leave.”

You sit with the cold coffee. You feel something move in your chest that you have not felt in a long time. Not relief. The absence of pressure. The room that opens up when the pressure that had been the shape of your life is removed and you remember that you have a body and that your body has been carrying something. You can feel the weight of the something for the first time, by feeling the gap where it had been.

You say, “Okay.”

The polycule contains three partners, each of whom contributes daily to the reproduction of the puppygirl’s continued existence. Each partner expends, in an average week, twelve hours regulating her affect, the labor of preventing the crisis and the labor of recovering from one; eight hours on the domestic work she cannot or will not perform; four hours of sex performed as her stabilization, registered in the polycule as care; six hours on the interpretive labor of translating her demands into needs for herself and for the polycule; four hours of additional waged or freelance work to cover the share of the rent she does not pay; and three hours of triangulation, smoothing her absences and defending her conduct to the other partners.

Total expenditure per partner: thirty-seven hours of unwaged labor weekly. In return she receives a portion of the puppygirl’s attention, some affection, the social fact of partnership. Call this five hours’ worth of reciprocal care, generously calculated, the necessary labor *v*, the wage-form, the portion that appears in the relation as the whole of the exchange.

The remainder is surplus labor. The rate of surplus-value *s/v* in this polycule is thirty-two over five, or six hundred and forty per cent. Marx’s English textile workers, in the worst documented years of the 1860s, ran rates of one to two hundred per cent. The polycule clears them by a factor of three.

Across the three partners the puppygirl appropriates ninety-six hours of weekly surplus labor. Just under five thousand hours per annum. Priced at the floor of waged domestic care, twenty-five US dollars an hour, the polycule absorbs roughly one hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars per year into the puppygirl’s reproduction. The therapist-equivalent valuation of the affective regulation component alone clears two hundred thousand. The figures understate the case. They do not register the foregone writing, the foregone sleep, the foregone medical care of the trans women who produce them. They do not register her household, her HRT, her rent, her phone bill, her transit, paid by partners and quietly transferred into her existence as constant capital, the means of her continued production as the feminized figure for whose protection the polycule was organized.

What appears in the polycule as the natural condition of loving a sensitive girl is a definite social relation between trans women bearing the form of a relation between trans women and a puppy. Federici named the operation. Reproductive labor performed under conditions that figure it as love is the form unwaged extraction takes when its workers are women. The fetish-character of the configuration is precisely this. The partners cannot see one another for the figure that appears between them. They see her. They do not see the labor that has gone into her, or one another, or the kinship that has been redistributed into her reproduction.

The contradiction in the polycule resolves only in rupture. No process, no held space, no programme of accountability, no remedial framework of any kind can adjust the rate of surplus-value within the relation, because the relation is the rate. The puppygirl is the wage-form rendered as a girl. The means of her reproduction are the labor of the trans women around her, and so long as those means remain in her possession the extraction continues at six hundred and forty per cent regardless of any sincerely conducted polycule meeting.

The expropriators must be expropriated. The means of reproduction return to the workers when, and only when, the workers withdraw their labor and recover their hours. Each partner who leaves recovers thirty-two hours a week. Across the three partners ninety-six hours of weekly labor are returned to the trans women who produced them.

You are allowed to recover your hours. The contract was never one you signed.

You sleep. Ten hours a night for six nights in a row. On the seventh night, twelve. You wake up disoriented. You had forgotten that bodies could rest. You had forgotten that a morning could begin in your own time.

The dishes get done less often. There are sometimes dishes in the sink for two days. No one cares. You do them when you do them. The world does not end.

The rent gets paid by the three of you who remain in the apartment, in equal shares, because that is what rent is, because that is what rent has always been, because the version where one of you fronted seven hundred dollars a month for nine months was the strange version. You did not know it was the strange version while you were inside it. You know now.

You start writing again. You had not realized you had stopped. You had told yourself you were on a slow stretch. You had told yourself you were busy with the polycule. You had told yourself you were figuring out your next book. You had not written in fourteen months. The first thing you write is a paragraph in your notes app about how strange it is that your hands remember the shape of typing even after they have not done it in a long time. You write it in a coffee shop, alone, at ten in the morning, on a Wednesday, while the puppygirl is in a different city, in a different polycule, with a different version of you who has not yet seen what you have seen.

Your other partner moves into your apartment. The two of you had not slept in the same bed, more than twice in a month, in a long time. The two of you sleep together now most nights. You had forgotten the shape of her body against yours when she is dreaming. You had forgotten that her hair smells like her shampoo, which is the shampoo she chose for herself, not one that the puppygirl had picked out for her. You begin to know her again. You begin to know that you had not known her, for a long time, because the room had not had space in it for the two of you to know each other.

She says, one Tuesday evening, while you are cooking, “You snore.” You say, “I don’t.” She says, “Baby, you do. It’s cute.” It is the first thing anyone has told you about your sleep in fourteen months. She says, another evening, “I’m making us dinner tomorrow. You don’t have to do anything.” You say, “Okay.” You sit on the kitchen counter and watch her cook. You eat what she has made. She does the dishes. The dishes get done.

You cook for her. She cooks for you. You divide the dishes evenly. You divide the laundry evenly. You sit at the kitchen table in the evenings and talk about things that are not the polycule, that are not the rent, that are not the most recent crisis. You ask her questions about her day. She asks you questions about your day. You answer one another. You listen to the answers.

The third partner, the new girlfriend, the favorite, leaves the polycule six months after you do. She finds you both on Instagram. She messages you. She says she had thought, when you and your other partner left, that the two of you had been bad to the puppygirl. She says she had heard the version the puppygirl had told her. She says she has now seen the pattern. She asks if she can take you both to coffee. You meet her in the spring. The three of you sit together. She cries. You and your other partner hold her. The three of you make a kind of kinship that was not possible inside the polycule, because the polycule had not been a kinship between you. It had been a delivery system.

You think, sometimes, about the woman who had been with the puppygirl before any of you. The one the polycule had decided had failed. The one the polycule had grieved as a casualty. You think you understand her now. You think she had seen, six years before you did, what it had taken you years to see. You hope she is well. You hope she is sleeping. You hope she is writing again. You will probably never meet her. You feel that you owe her something. You feel that what you owe her can only be paid forward, to whoever the puppygirl is currently disappearing.

It turns out you had a girlfriend. It turns out you had a sister. It turns out the polycule was a polycule. It turns out the kinship between trans women had been there the whole time, the entire time you had been spending it on her, the entire time you had thought it was hers to spend. The kinship had been yours. It had been ours. It had been there in the air between the dishes you washed and the apologies you gave and the crises you absorbed. You could not see it because she was standing in front of it.

She is not standing in front of it anymore. The kinship is the room. The room is large. The room is full of trans women, talking to one another, eating food they chose, going to bed when they want to go to bed, sleeping. The room is the size of all the hours you got back. You can fit your life inside it. You can fit your sisters inside it. You can fit the version of yourself who has not slept in nine months inside it, and you can let her sleep, and when she wakes you can ask her what she wants, and she can answer.

The joy is armed. It has not been kind. It did not ask permission. It did not hold space. It did not produce a programme of accountability. It recovered what was taken, and it built, with what was recovered, a kinship the polycule had been delivering to the wrong address.

*If this meant something to you, you can support my work at https://ko-fi.com/bundleofstyyx*